KEI recently submitted comments to the US Copyright Office regarding the upcoming Treaty for the Blind. One element of those comments was a test of the availability of books in reading-accessible format.
Today I filed my comments to the United States Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Accessible Works and Standards, a topic related to the provision of access to copyrighted works for blind or other persons with disabilities.
KEI filed comments with the WHO Expert Working Group. A copy is available here.
These were my tweets yesterday from the Fordham/Cambridge IPR event:
# Fordham event in Cambridge, UK. Michael Keplinger from WIPO said treaty for reading disabled “would take years and not solve the problem”
# At Fordham/Cambridge IP event, Luc Devigne of DG Trade says ACTA membership will be “enlarged,” become standard for developing countries.
On April 9, 2009, Peter Brantley from the Internet Archive gave a talk at KEI on the proposed “Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement.” The following are my rough notes from the presentation.
Peter has been a director of the Internet Archive (IA) for about three weeks. He was accompanied by Will Rodger, a Managing Director of the Law Media Group (LMG), a firm that represents Microsoft and the IA on the Google Books settlement. Attending the event were the following persons:
On April 8, 2009, the FDA announced it had awarded Novartis a one-time priority review voucher (PRV) to use towards a future new drug application, for Coartem, a malaria drug. While the PRV was designed as an incentive to develop new drugs, Coartem was developed and put on the market outside the United States years before the PRV legislation was proposed. Continue Reading
The following is my report from the April 7, 2009 Reading Rights Coalition demonstration in front of the NYC offices of the Authors Guild, regarding text to speech for Kindle 2.
I am in Montreal right now, and missed the Right Rights Coalition demonstration at the Authors Guild. Manon, Judit and Malini from our office are in NYC at the demonstration, and said it was incredibly moving. Several people at the protest sent reports by tweeter. The most complete was probably Abraham Lloyd. This was his account, with the Tweets organized from his first to last.
In preparation for the 3rd meeting of the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), WIPO published a 31 page document (CDIP/3/2) on March 18, 2009 listing a roster of consultants for technical assistance the Organization employed from January 1, 2005 to December 31, 2008. This is a welcome step in providing greater transparency into WIPO’s technical assistance activities. Continue Reading
The Authors Guild is claiming text to speech functions in software programs and e-book readers violate their copyrights, and should be turned off unless they are paid more for the extra functionality. Obviously the geniuses among the Authors Guild are on to something. There are many similar areas of functionality to be exploited by the Authors Guild. Here are some thoughts on how the Guild might squeeze more money from readers, if they want to expand upon their new anti-consumer business strategy: