Trade Group Representing Many Large Companies Claims That Exceptions For The Blind Would 'Cast Aside' Copyright

from the wtf? dept

As you may recall, we've recently written about the MPAA's protests against a treaty for the blind, as well as a similar protest from the Intellectual Property Owners Association (on that front, we heard that many members of that group never saw that letter before it was sent out, and were not happy about it). Now there's another group sending a letter, and it's equally as ridiculous. Business Europe, which appears to have a lot of non-European companies as members (interesting, that), has written a ridiculous letter with little basis in fact, arguing that this treaty for the blind would be "casting aside" the "international copyright infrastructure."

Of course, it does no such thing. All it does is provide extremely limited situations in which copyright restrictions would be limited for the sake of making it easier for vision-impaired people to access works. They also claim that it relies on "hasty conclusions" which is flat out laughable, since the treaty has been under discussion for almost three decades, but has been regularly blocked by organizations like those mentioned above. Business Europe's real complaint seems to be that it just doesn't like the people who like this treaty.

... it is strongly supported by the same group of NGOs and advanced emerging economy countries that pursue a general IPR-weakening agenda at WIPO and other international forums.

Got that? Those who argue that providing more rights to the public support this very minor place where more rights would be provided to the vision-impaired public, and we can't have that. No, no. They also, rather bizarrely, claim that some countries who are likely to sign on to this treaty "do not provide any copyright protection whatsoever." Jamie Love at KEI asks exactly which countries they're talking about. The statement from Business Europe is nothing but fear mongering. If a country doesn't provide any copyright protection at all, then why would it even care about a treaty whose focus is providing exceptions to copyright?

The level of freakout from these giant companies over helping the blind is really quite incredible.

Filed Under: blind, copyright, vision impaired, wto
Companies: business europe

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.

Filed Under: acta, copyright, treaties, vision impaired