[A2k] Re: DRM and the World Blind Union's Proposed Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons

[Janet Hawtin]

If a treaty requires that any copyright law has a good clear
commitment to accessibility for blind people, for deaf people, for
anyone who requires a form of change to the expression of the
copyrighted material in order to make legal use of the material, then
that is a useful statement/treaty.

There should be no situation where the tools of one group(people
making/distributing/promoting DRM and technological protection
measures) are permitted to change the allowances which have already
been asked for as exemptions for copyright law. Even in the nasty DMCA
style laws there have been exemptions secured for accessibility.
Recovering that ground to restate that this technology, which is only
able to comply with some of the exemptions for legal use, should not
stand in the way of blind use, should be redundant.

Giving the technology a precedent for having law defined to work
around its inability to provide legal access is the beginning of
shaping second round of legal restrictions which would have to again
secure fair use, educational use, because the technology is not able
to recognise a legal use and provide access.

In my opinion a second round of law which defines different
permissions in a piecemeal way for permission to use the gate for
access to the land which has already been negotiated is legitimising a
broken gate. If another gate is used then new permissions would have
to be sought, when in actual fact the permission to access the land
has already been secured and the problem is just that broken gates are
mishandling that access. Broken gates should not have their own global
treaties.

Keep the focus on ensuring that in all cases copyright law is not
standing in the way of making information accessible. The problem of
the gate is a problem of noncompliance with copyright law for those
who seek to use the technology despite knowing its failings. imho
Those problems would be better addressed by taking a DRM/
technological protection measure distributer to court for making
information non-compliant with existing accessibility permissions, or
permissions for fair use as they can not handle those reliably either.

Much respect to all in this discussion. It is difficult stuff to
negotiate because the whole thing is so obfuscated.

Janet