Intellectual Monopolists Scorn the Blind

The ever-vigilant James Love pointed to this fascinating submission from the UK's venerable Royal National Institute of the Blind [.pdf]:

Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is the UK's leading charity offering information, support and advice to over two million people with sight loss.

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Even in the wealthiest markets, less than 5 percent of published books are made accessible in formats that reading disabled people can use. In many developing countries the figure drops to one per cent. We call this a “book famine”.

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In theory, reading disabled people can read any book a non-reading disabled person can read, thanks to so-called “accessible formats”. These formats do not change the content of a work, but rather the way in which the person reading accesses it. They include large print audio, Daisy [http://www.daisy.org/] and braille.

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What is certain is that the market has failed to deliver anything like this ideal scenario, despite the best efforts over many years of campaigning organisations like ours and of some examples of “best practice” from publishers.

The five per cent figure shows that mainstream publishing, which quite legitimately exists to make a profit, has not catered for the “reading disabled market” to any significant extent. To hope therefore that “market forces” will resolve the book famine problem would be to put faith in a tried and thus far failed model.

This, then, is the reality of "modern" copyright: it fails to serve huge numbers of people, many of whom are already suffering from discrimination in other ways.

Given this situation, various organisations are not unreasonably trying to facilitate access to copyrighted works for those who are visually disabled with a new WIPO treaty that would define basic rights for this group. Who could object to such a humanitarian cause? Well, the publishers, of course.

The RNIB explores the reasons for this:

At WIPO, broadly speaking, rights holders and some Member States maintain that the solution can be found entirely through the use of voluntary, cooperative measures between rights holders and members of the reading disabled community. They therefore “back” the WIPO Stakeholder Platform and oppose the treaty proposal.

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A worldly observer might therefore suggest that opposition to a treaty stems more from a dislike of any kind of exception to copyright, than from a conviction that a treaty would not help increase access to books.

A worldly observer might indeed - just as an equally wordly observer might suggest that publishers don't give a damn about those with visual impairments, and are prepared to fight tooth nail against even the blind to preserve their intellectual monopolies.

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US ACTA Official Squirms, Talks Drivel

Great work by James Love here:

After attending the three day WTO Ministerial meeting in Geneva, I took the non-stop United Airlines Flight back to Washington, DC. On the airplane were a number of U.S. government officials including the head of USTR, Ambassador Ron Kirk. I had a chance to talk to Kirk about the secrecy of the ACTA agreement. He said the ACTA text would be made public, “when it is finished.” I told him it that was too late, and the public wanted the text out now, before it is too late to influence anything.

Kirk said he was aware there were those that wanted the text public, but the issue of transparency was “about as complicated as it can get,” and they didn't want people “walking away from the table,” which would likely happen if the text was public, he said.

*Who* exactly would walk away from the table? Why on earth would they do such a thing if there's nothing to hide, and the treaty will be made public anyway? This answer is pure and utter drivel - evidently the weak best that he could come up with after being put on the spot by the quick-thinking Love.

It basically amounts to each delegation trying to suggest that while *they* are in favour of opening up, the other delegations would go bananas, and so, regretfully, everything remains shrouded in secrecy. It's a kind of sick variant of the prisoner's dilemma, as implemented by and for self-serving delegations.

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Will WIPO Wipe the Floor?

This is how the world ends, not with a bang - not with a clash of titans - but with a whimper, in an obscure WIPO committee. The committee in question rejoices in the moniker "U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization's Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights Committee". And this is how the report on the EFF's site lays out the effects of the current draft of its work:

The treaty would give broadcasters, cablecasters, and potentially webcasters, broad new 50 year rights to control transmissions over the Internet, irrespective of the copyright status of the transmitted material. It also requires countries to provide legal protection for broadcaster technological protection measures.

Essentially it would be a huge win for the major content owners, a huge win for the status quo, and a huge win for IP maximalists. As this piece from Boing Boing explains, those IP maximalists are largely in the US, and the proposals in this treaty are largely driven by their agenda of locking down all forms of content, everywhere in the world, in the belief that it will increase their profits, even if it will chill all kinds of creative expression in the process.

Nothing new there, then. But what is notable is how the battle is being taken behind the scenes - not in public forums where alternative viewpoints can be aired, and the erroneous logic of the proposal refuted - but in the dark, rank, chummy world of deadly-tedious drafting committees, where every trick in the book can be used to out-manoeuvre those fighting to defend creative freedom.

The treaty in question is a case in point. As the EFF report on the moves explains:

Webcasting is now back in the treaty, after spending last year in a separate "working paper" because the majority of countries opposed its inclusion in 2004. Despite many counties' opposition again in 2005, it’s been included in the treaty as a non-mandatory Appendix. Countries that sign the treaty have the option – at any time -- to grant webcasters the same exclusive rights given to broadcasters and cablecasters by depositing a notice with WIPO.

At the same time, some of the key proposals to balance the impact of the new treaty have been removed from the new draft treaty text (the Draft Basic Proposal) and relegated to a new separate "Working Paper". For instance, the alternative that the treaty not include the contentious Technological Protection Measure obligations is not in the Draft Basic Proposal, but has been sidelined to the Draft Working Paper.

Unfortunately, it is hard to see who is going to stop this. As more and more battles are won at the national level, so the fight over content moves up the stack, to supra-national bodies that wield immense power, are subject to little or no oversight, and which are largely aligned with the interests of the already-rich and the already-powerful against anybody who would like to share a little of that money and power.

Update 1: The EFF reports that webcasting is now out of the main treaty again, but that the threat in the longer-term remains.

Update 2: Here's a good report by James Love on where things now stand (via On the Commons).