p2pnet news view Freedom | Politics:- “Last week Obama worked with PhRMA to kill a Medical R&D Treaty at the World Health Organization.

“This week he is trying to kill a treaty for blind and reading disabled persons.”

That’s the conclusion of a post by Knowledge Ecology International director James Love (right) in the Huffington Post.

“This is not encouraging,” he states.

The US government, “in combination with other high income countries in ‘Group B’,” wants to block an agreement to discuss a treaty for people who are blind, or have other reading disabilities”.

During the week, Love was at a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. And that’s when the news broke.

A proposal had been made to institute a treaty allowing cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats accessible to people who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic, or have other reading disabilities, using 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,” says Love, going on the move is backed by a large number of civil society NGOs, the World Blind Union, the National Federation of the Blind in the US, the International DAISY Consortium, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), Bookshare.Org, and groups representing persons with reading disabilities all around the world

He goes on »»»

The number of accessible works is very small everywhere, relative to what “sighted” persons can read. However, in developing countries, the collections are super small, and even in the USA, access to works in languages other than English is practically non-existent.

Under the current international legal regime, there is almost no sharing of these works across borders. The treaty would change that, vastly expanding the availability of works to all persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

Every regional group in the developing world expressed support for advancing work on this proposal, as part of a broader agenda on access to knowledge and the protection of consumer interests.

The opposition from the United States and other high income countries is due to intense lobbying from a large group of publishers that oppose a “paradigm shift,” where treaties would protect consumer interests, rather than expand rights for copyright owners.

The Obama administration was lobbied heavily,” including meetings with high level White House officials,” says the Love, adding:

“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.”

(Thanks, Aaron)

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Huffington Post – Obama Joins Group to Block Treaty for Blind and Other Reading Disabilities, May 28, 2009