WIPO Reaches Agreement on Treaty for Blind

WIPO Reaches Agreement on Treaty for Blind is a Mint news report by Pankaj Mishra published on 26 June 2013. The piece covers the agreement reached at Marrakesh on a WIPO treaty to widen access to books for the visually impaired across countries, and quotes Sunil Abraham praising India’s negotiators for carrying domestic copyright best practice into global policy.

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📰 Published in:: Mint
📅 Date:: 26 June 2013
👤 Author:: Pankaj Mishra
📄 Type:: News Report
📰 Newspaper Link:: Read Online

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Bangalore: Officials at the World Intellectual Property Organisation have reached an agreement to provide wider access to books for the visually impaired in different countries, a long-pending demand of the World Blind Union and activist groups.

If officially approved, the treaty will help distribution of specially formatted books for the blind and visually impaired in different countries by removing copyright law hurdles. For instance, US-based Bookshare, which is an online library for people with sight disabilities, has about 200,000 books in its collection, but only about 75,000 of them can be distributed in the UK because of copyright restrictions.

According to the Intellectual Property Watch website that track international policy on the subject, the agreement was reached over the weekend in Marrakesh, Morocco, where a conference to facilitate access to published books for people with sight disabilities is being held.

"The text, which has not been presented to the conference plenary, nor adopted yet, also addresses the issue known as 'the Berne gap', which refers to countries which are not part of international treaties governing copyright, such as the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and the WIPO Copyright Treaty," the website said in a report on 24 June.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), India has 63 million visually impaired people, of whom about 8 million are blind.

Experts such as Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society said Indian negotiators played a crucial role in pushing for these amendments.

"India's copyright law after the latest amendment has a very robust exception for the disabled. It is disability neutral and works neutral. We must applaud the Indian negotiators for exporting Indian best practice to global copyright policy. India continues to be a leader in WIPO when it comes to protecting the public interest and facilitating access to knowledge," said Abraham.

The treaty, which promotes sharing the books in any format for the blind or visually impaired, is expected to alleviate the "book famine" experienced by many of the WHO-estimated 300 million people suffering from such disability in the world, Intellectual Property Watch said.

"The treaty however is both disability specific, i.e. the visually impaired, and works specific, mostly targeted at ending the book famine," Abraham said.

Context and Background

The agreement reached in Marrakesh in June 2013 led to the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled on 27 June 2013. It entered into force on 30 September 2016 after being ratified by the required number of countries. India, which had played an active role in negotiations, ratified the treaty in 2014.

India’s Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012 — the “latest amendment” that Sunil Abraham refers to — had introduced a broad disability exception that permitted the reproduction of works in accessible formats without requiring the rights holder’s permission. This was considered among the most progressive such provisions in the world at the time, and Abraham’s observation that India had effectively “exported” this standard to the multilateral treaty text was a pointed acknowledgement of the role civil society and government negotiators had played.

The “book famine” — the term used by advocacy groups to describe the vast shortage of accessible-format books available to people with visual impairments — remained the central moral argument driving the treaty negotiations. The Marrakesh Treaty is widely regarded as one of the more significant access-to-knowledge victories in modern intellectual property law.