SCCR32 Day 4: KEI Statement on education, the Tunis Model Law and machine translation

KEI, you have the floor.

>> Well thank you very much. One of the challenges that governments have when they update and modify their Copyright laws is to address the issue of exceptions, including those in education. In the area of the rights, the task is much simpler. If a treaty has a requirement that you provide a life plus 50-year trade agreements life plus 70-year Copyright term, that’s a fairly unambiguous thing to address in drafting. But if there’s a possibility but no clear direction on how to implement the exceptions to the rights in the area of education or other areas, the role of WIPO in providing advice in those cases is complicated because it involves a series of judgment calls.

In the 1976 model law, Tunis model law and Copyright for Developing Countries that was done collaboratively between WIPO and UNESCO, I call attention to Section 7 of the 1976 model law titled fair use which has a series of recommended exceptions, including for education, in that section. We would be interested in having people look at the — because it’s a long time since this has been done in terms of the model law approach — people take a look at the provisions on exceptions in Section 7 and other parts of the Tunis model law of 1976 to the proposals that have been made by the Africa Group and to GRULAC and some of the other groups in this meeting to see if there would be — if it would be fruitful to consider in this nonbinding but soft instrument of model law some work to see if people would benefit from some updating of what the model exceptions might look at in terms of a work programme going forward or even to just accept suggestions and commentary from various stakeholders, experts in governments, as to what kind of changes they think could be made in the model law. Because the role of technical assistance at WIPO continues to be a very concrete and consequential activity.

The last thing I would say is that — on a completely different note — is that we have now become to rely more and more on machine-generated translations of works that are published in languages that are not our primary speaking language. And I know that others and many students do the same. I just think it’s important that we avoid situations that people make claims that Copyright would interfere with a machine-generated translation or that contracts would prevent this type of activity which is something that could really expand access to works. I mention that because we’ve seen that in the area of works for people with disabilities where publishers of these contractual rights with Amazon to prevent the speech generated translation of speech on the Reader and other similar devices. I’d just like to make sure that going forward, people are aware of the fact that this area of machine-generated translations, although it’s imperfect and really pretty bad in some languages, is improving every day. And in the future I think will become a more important component of our ability to expand the reach of what people have access to and quite important in the area of education. Thank you.