Stevie Wonder urges WIPO to sign copyright treaty
Blind musician Stevie Wonder has pleaded for the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to sign a treaty to improve access to books for millions of blind, visually-impaired and print-disabled people.
More than 600 negotiators from WIPO’s 186 member states are in Marrakesh, Morocco, trying to finalise a deal that would provide greater access to copyrighted works in formats such as Braille, large print text and audio books.
“We stand at the cusp of a momentous time in history,” Wonder said in a video statement to the meeting, which ends on June 28. “The time has come ... The world’s blind and visually impaired are counting on you.”
A treaty would end years of discussion on improving access to published works for people with visual disabilities.
Fewer than 60 countries are believed to have special provisions for visually impaired people, and these exemptions don’t usually allow works converted into accessible formats to be traded, even between countries with similar laws.
As well as requiring countries to introduce specific exceptions and limitations in their copyright laws to allow books to be produced in accessible formats, a new treaty would permit such copies to be shared across international borders.
WIPO director general Francis Gurry said the treaty would “alleviate the book famine that causes over 300 million visually impaired persons, the majority of them in developing countries, to be excluded from access to over 90 percent of published works”.
There are an estimated 314 million blind and visually impaired people in the world, 90 percent of whom live in developing countries. According to the World Blind Union, of the million or so books published each year, less than 5 percent are made available in formats available to the visually impaired.
Gurry added that negotiators must provide assurances to authors and publishers that that system “will not expose their assets to misuse in parallel markets that are not intended to serve the visually impaired and the print disabled”.
Among the issues that still need ironing out include whether the commercial availability of accessible format works will affect whether digital versions of them can be transferred across borders, and how obligations on the scope of limitations and exceptions from previous international copyright treaties will be incorporated into the proposed treaty.
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works of 1886, the major international copyright treaty, allows for copyright exemptions such as news reporting and short quotations. Otherwise, it is left to national governments to define what limitations and exceptions are permitted. In practice, limitations and exceptions contained in national laws vary widely.
