Funny How Those In Favor Of ACTA Are Against Treaty Providing More Access To Content For Vision Impaired
from the must-strengthen-copyright-at-all-costs dept
It seems pretty bizarre that companies and industry organizations would be against helping those with reading disabilities or vision impairment -- but that's exactly what you get in the discussion over creating some loopholes in copyright law to make it easier to reformat content to help those who would have difficulties reading it otherwise. Their concern, of course, is anything that can be seen as weakening copyright law. As we've noted in the past, there's never really been any weakening of copyright law... ever. The only exception I can think of is when the US officially established that government documents could not be covered by copyright. But every other change has only strengthened it -- so perhaps it's no surprise that the usual suspects, including the MPAA and the RIAA are upset about this, claiming that this WIPO treaty on this subject would "begin to dismantle the existing global treaty structure of copyright law, through the adoption of an international instrument at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms."Now, that's funny, because you could pretty much say that ACTA is doing the same thing... and yet these same groups are strongly in favor of ACTA, which would also be at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms." Funny how their view changes completely when discussing treaties that would beef up copyright law vs. those that would create important and useful loopholes in it.
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Filed Under: acta, copyright, treaties, vision impaired
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Discriminatory?
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Re:
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Re: Re:
As much as persons may despise the MPAA, the RIAA, the BSA and all the other "A's", their comments in response to the US Copyright Office's Request for Information, a process that is far from finished, the trade associations do raise many important points, the most important of which are that the language of the Brazil, Paraguay and Ecuador proposal is so loosely drafted and ambiguous that its enactment would in fact have a significantly negative impact on national laws having absolutely nothing to do with meeting the needs of those with visual and hearing impairments.
The other groups and idividuals who submitted comments are generally laudatory of efforts to address issues associated with the visually and hearing impaired. They do not, however, provide any analysis of the actual language.
All parties submitting comments agree with the broad concept, but the devil is always in the details, and the details in this case extend way, way beyond the concept.
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Control, control, control.
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Control, control, control.
My question about ACTA is, if it is so great, why is what it says being kept such a deep dark secret? Is it that they want to implement exactly the sort of policies I have listed above, and they want no one else to know what's in it so the rest of us will be unable to effectively oppose it?
Copyright is ever being tilted more and more in favor of big corporations and against consumers. And this trend seems to be increasing at an exponential rate.
I think such policies, if carried to their ultimate extremes, will ultimately be counterproductive by making criminals of anyone who does anything the copyright owner does not like, such as by driving ordinary users to resort to "piracy" to get content in a form they can use as they see fit, instead of loaded up with DRM that leaves it nearly unusable.
May they come to their senses before it's too late.
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Idiots
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