It seems that in the quest to protect e-books from the evils of piracy, a small group of readers are left out in the cold – the visually impaired. Advocates and copyright experts alike are seeking an exemption from parts of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, allowing them to circumvent the copyright protection in e-books to convert the text to speech without fear of legal action. An article in PC World earlier this week highlights some of the problems that disabled people experience with rights-managed media.
The DMCA punishes people with disabilities, say some experts in law and technology. They contend it clashes with existing copyright laws and even the Constitution.
“This law has to be reformed,” says Robin Gross, an attorney and executive director of IP Justice, an international civil liberties organization.
“Freedom of speech guarantees of the Constitution explicitly require that copyright holders do not have total control over” how someone experiences their work, Gross says. But she contends the DMCA reverses that right by allowing copyright-holders to lock a PC from giving voice to e-books.
Between 60 and 90 percent of the estimated 50,000 e-books available lock out text-to-speech software, advocates for the disabled say. Many of those are recent bestsellers, but even literature in the public domain for hundreds of years is locked under some e-book implementations.
If the e-books weren’t locked, text-to-speech software could easily and quickly make the works available to sightless readers.
“It just is a tragedy,” says George Kerscher, a senior officer at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, a nonprofit organization that converts written texts into audio books.
“How stupid are we when the information exists in a digital form and we’ve got to go through the time-consuming, laborious, expensive, error-prone process of having somebody scan it or re-key it?” Kerscher says.
Currently, anyone bypassing copy protection on an e-book can be fined $2,500 for a single violation of the DMCA. The Copyright Office will rule on this and various other exemption requests later this year. You can read more about these developments at the PC World Web site.
The Mac Observer Spin:
A number of e-book reading applications and publishing systems offer the ability to leave the text-to-speech features of a book unlocked, but many publishers don’t include that simple little courtesy. A particularly telling quote from that article has one publisher saying that ‘[t]he market, not the government, should solve the issue.’
Sure, it’s possible that the market could do something about it. The market could also do something about providing wheelchair access to public areas or hearing aid loops in theatres. The market could make its own decisions about whether to publish material in Braille or provide a teletypewriter service so that deaf people could make a telephone call.
The fact is that it doesn’t just happen that way. The market as a whole has not been able to do any of these things on its own without significant prompting from advocacy groups and, in many cases, the government. People just don’t think, and in this case it is both the drafters of the DMCA and the media publishers who are to blame: it’s a lack of consideration for the millions of people who just can’t do what the rest of the world takes for granted.
The Copyright Office will hopefully do the right thing, permit an exemption, and allow e-books to be opened to the blind. To deny this would simply add to the sheer ignorance and stupidity this law has already perpetuated.