[A2k] In their own words: why they oppose the treaty to facilitate access and sharing of works for people with reading disabilities

[Claude Almansi]

Hi Manon and All

Re:

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 5:42 AM, Manon Ress <manon.ress@keionline.org> wrote:
> (...)
> Let me know if you are interested in filing reply comments to the US
> Copyright office notice of inquiry.
> Manon

Not being a US citizen I can't, but reading:
>
> In their own words: why they oppose the treaty to facilitate access
> and sharing of works for people with reading disabilities
> http://keionline.org/node/695

and your copy of this post, I wonder how long the content industry
will go on encouraging wild copies rather than accepting a copyright
restriction that would create a whole new and strongly motivated
market for copyrighted works? With this treaty, people who have to use
text-to-speech or Braille or large print are not asking for charity,
but for the same right to borrow and also buy books people who don't
have to use such techs have.

People who have to use text-to-speech (TTS) tech do capture its audio
output of "copy-protected-for-the-blind" works they want to read later
on with a portable device. According to CH (and several other
countries') copyright law, making unprotected copies for such personal
use is legal, and so is sharing such copies with people of your
"private sphere" (relatives and friends) .  These copyright laws do
not specify in which countries these people of your private sphere
must reside. Hence it is likely that such audio captures do cross
borders this way.

Of course, an audio capture is not as handy as an electronic text for
browsing and note-taking. But the converse speech-to-text tech is
making great progresses: see
<http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.html>
(nov. 19, 2009), where Google announced its making available the
"google talk" speech-to-text tech for automatically captioning videos.
For the time being, only for educational videos in English, but they
mean to expand its application. So people who receive from their
private sphere an audio capture of a protected text, will be able to
use a pseudo video of it (1) and have it reconverted to electronic
text on YT,  keeping the pseudo video private, or deleting it from YT
after grabbing the captioning text file.

Again, a captioning text file is not as handy as a properly formatted
text file for TTS reading: you can't skip from header to header, then
you'd have to get rid of all the time codes, I suppose (2). So even if
it will be impossible to prevent such roundabout circulation of texts,
there still would be a market for properly formatted text versions -
if the copyright champions would care to stop shooting their foot and
agree to the treaty.

Best

Claude

(1) I'm not sure about the accessibility of video editing softwares.
But if they do have the needed keyboard shortcuts etc, it is very
simple to make a pseudo video from an audio file: you just bang a
black picture on the video track. I've done so with a black jpg, in
order to transcribe audio files with DotSUB.com, for instance.

(2) Or can you instruct TTS tech not to voice figures at the beginning
of a paragraph?