Will Obama Sacrifice Blind Readers to the Content Industry’s Agenda?

In a recent column in the Financial Times, James Boyle assesses the Obama administration’s initial record in the copyright/intellectual property arena and finds it to be business as usual. He concludes his argument with the example of accessibility for blind readers:

… the final straw may be the Obama administration’s opposition to a proposal on copyright exceptions for the visually impaired. About 95 per cent of books are not available for blind or partially sighted readers. Some countries have exceptions in their laws which, very sensibly, condition the grant of the copyright monopoly on a (very) few public interest limitations, such as the right to make non-commercial versions of works one has legally purchased in order to make them accessible to the visually impaired. (For example, generating a machine-readable audio book, or a Braille version, from a legally purchased digital text.) The proposal would generalise and harmonise those exceptions. It is backed by a number of developing countries and opposed – quietly – by the US and most of the European Union. Hip-deep in a colossal market failure on a global scale, they say optimistically that the market will provide an acceptable solution, though there is overwhelming empirical evidence that it will not.

Why oppose this proposal? Scaremongering aside, there is no real threat to anyone’s business model here. But if one sees any limitation of the most extreme version of copyright as a dangerous and ideologically driven attack on property itself, well then, one must fight. This proposal represents the ideas that rights should have limits and that we should harmonise limitations and exceptions as well as rights themselves. It is that principle, the principle of balance, that must be resisted. Even if it puts one in the embarrassing position of – ever so pragmatically – sacrificing one’s blind citizens to an industry agenda. In a world where we have to deal with torture and climate change and the collapse of our economic system, this little piece of moral cowardice is not something many people are going to notice. But it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, nonetheless.

I can attest to Boyle’s assertion that accessible texts don’t harm anyone’s business model. I downloaded his most recent book, The Public Domain, as soon as I heard about it. I modified the file architecture to make it more usable with my screenreader, and it became one of the adaptable, accessible texts that inspired the Fair Use Lab. Along the way, I bought a print copy of the book, too.