Rowan Tree and Red Thread

Boing Boing has another example of the tortuous workings of the copyright industry as discussed at WIPO (technically the 18th session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights), which is discussing a treaty proposed by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay to extend exemption/protection for format translation of copyright works to formats accessible to the blind and other people with disabilities that make reading difficult (e.g. dyslexia, paralysis, etc.)

To quote James Love of the Huffington Post: "The main aim of the treaty is to allow the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities."

The proposed treaty was blocked by the usual suspects of the USA, EU and Canada, as well as Australia, New Zealand, the Vatican and Norway. As per the last update the treaty survived the meeting and will return on the agenda of the next one, allowing the public time to lobby representatives and encourage them to support this plan.

James Love again: "The Obama Administration was lobbied heavily on this issue, including meetings with high level White House officials. Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works."

C'mon folks. This should be a no-brainer.

[XP DW->LJ)

I've always been a half-hearted sort of conservationist, wishy-washy pro-animal rights, pale Green sort of guy. The 'Environment' is a big issue, really dozens of issues, and it's hard to know what to take at face value and what to be sceptical about.

I do some physics though, enough to follow most of the arguments and to see that anthropogenic climate change is a real problem, one that needs a global effort to tackle. So I'm happy to wave the Blog Action Day banner and work in whatever small way I can for change on our use of resources and the handling of waste.

I would recommend the Geek Counterpoint podcasts on Climate Change (episodes 54, 56-60) as a good summary of climate change issues, particularly in its even-handed approach to the sceptics, but I'm sad to say that Geek Counterpoint has gone into hibernation due to work/blogging conflicts. The podcasts are still up and well worth listening to.