Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The United States Senate has a terrific opportunity to expand opportunity The United States Senate has just been presented with the ratification package for the Marrakesh Treaty. We are joining with our peers in the disability and library community in a joint statement to strongly encourage the Senate to ratify the treaty and for Congress to implement the minor legislative changes recommended as part of the package. We know a great deal about this Treaty, which is designed to help people who are blind or have other disabilities that interfere with reading, such as dyslexia. Our nonprofit organization operates Bookshare , the largest online library in the world that focuses on the needs of people with these disabilities. The creation of Bookshare was made possible because of an enlightened copyright law exception. And, that American copyright exception was the inspiration for the Marrakesh Treaty! Because the Marrakesh Treaty was modeled after the Chafee Amendment, as the Sect...

I’ve been actively advocating for an international copyright exception model that would greatly benefit people with disabilities, as anyone who has read my blog over the years can attest! My passion at Benetech for the last twenty-five years has been making technology tools to meet the reading needs of people who are blind, dyslexic or have other print disabilities. After all, Benetech’s Bookshare initiative is the largest online library serving people with print disabilities in the world.  We help more than 250,000 people with print disabilities thanks to our U.S. copyright exception. We could serve many more with a comparable international model. Diplomatic leaders gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco Last month, leaders from around the world gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, with the hope of taking a huge step forward and designing that international model. I’m excited to report: they did just that. The “ Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Wh...

A hot topic at the SCCR20/WIPO discussions in Geneva on global access to materials by the print disabilities is the term "Trusted Intermediaries"("TIs"). This was first introduced (to my knowledge) in the Stakeholder's Platform discussions, which were the quickly ginned-up alternative option created in response to the original introduction at WIPO of the Treaty for the Visually Impaired ("TVI") by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay (and now co-sponsored by Mexico). The concept of TIs uses U.S. and similar copyright exceptions as a starting point. In the U.S. exception, Section 121, posted at Bookshare as the Chafee Amendment, the term is "authorized entities." In the statute: "authorized entity" means a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities; I...

Brief Comments on Accessibility Concerns on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) The disability community should be concerned about ACTA for two reasons: 1. At its core it’s an anti-piracy agreement. The digital measures designed to defeat piracy usually end up equating accessibility with piracy. 2. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is being negotiated in secret. We don’t know if it’s benign or hostile to accessibility. Accessibility of digital media has been repeatedly and systematically denied because of digital measures to “protect” content. People with disabilities are repeatedly left out in the cold because accessibility concerns don’t rank high on tech company priority lists. A great (bad) example is Adobe, one of the leading ebook technology vendors, who just introduced their Digital Editions. Unfortunately, although accessibility was in the prior Adobe product, the Digital Rights Management (DRM) of Digital Editions locks out print disabled people. T...

Last Friday I spent almost two and a half hours in a wide-ranging conversation with Maria Pallante and Michele Woods of the Copyright Office (Michele's name updated, plus a summer law clerk attended) . I came away with a much better understanding of the issues they are exploring and certainly did my part to articulate why I support the positions we have. [Long post alert!] I would characterize the atmosphere as one of informed and intelligent skepticism on the part of the Copyright Office, with many questions exploring different positions. We discussed Chafee, especially in the context of the Amazon text-to-speech brouhaha, and the proposed international treaty that was tabled at the WIPO SCCR meeting in Geneva last month. The Chafee Amendment The U.S. copyright exemption for serving the print disabled is commonly called the Chafee Amendment: Section 121 of copyright law. It’s what makes our Bookshare service legally possible. The fact-finding public hearing and request for com...

Guest Blog from Amy McNeely, Bookshare Librarian This past week, April 12th through April 18th, was National Library Week . Every year, the American Library Association picks a different theme for the occasion. This year’s theme was “Worlds connect @ your library.” Bookshare is a unique library. When as the Bookshare librarian I fill out membership forms for different library organizations, I want to check all the boxes, as Bookshare is at once a school library, a public library and an academic library. This is one way Bookshare brings worlds together. My name is Amy McNeely and I am pleased to be the new librarian at Bookshare. I’ve been working in libraries for nine years. Over that time, I’ve seen a lot of different libraries, from both the back room, where I normally work in technical services, and the front in public services. I have worked in a bustling public library, a small governmental department library, a huge federal medical library, a small specialized library for ...

Section 121 of the Copyright Act, also known as the Chafee Amendment (17 U.S.C. Section 121) , defines a special class of organizations known as authorized entities. Quoting from the statute: "authorized entity" means a nonprofit organization or a governmental agency that has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access needs of blind or other persons with disabilities Bookshare represents that it is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that has a primary mission to provide the specialized services defined in Section 121. Bookshare is in continual contact with the Association of American Publishers to maintain the publishing industry’s input into its activities as an authorized entity, routinely submits copies of its standard user licenses, policies and conditions to AAP’s General Counsel for comment, whenever there is any significant change in them, and works closely with the publishing indust...