jan10b.indd


C&RL News January 2010  38

Access to copyrighted works for those 
with disabilities
As a member of the Library Copyright Alli-
ance (LCA), ALA recently seized an oppor-
tunity to assert one of the core principles of 
our association—equity of access to infor-
mation for all individuals.

On Friday, December 4, 2009, LCA joined 
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 
the Internet Archive, and the Chief Offi cers 
of State Library Agencies (COSLA) in fi ling 
reply comments to the Library of Congress’ 
U.S. Copyright Offi ce regarding facilitating 
access to copyrighted works for the blind or 
other persons with disabilities. 

The heart of the comments is simply that 
the blind or persons with other disabilities 
should be afforded the same access to 
copyrighted materials as sighted persons. 
Accordingly, LCA, EFF, and COSLA called for 
the United States to work for the adoption 
of a treaty at the World Intellectual Property 
Organization (WIPO) that facilitates such ac-
cess. LCA, EFF, and COSLA believe that legal 
solutions must be combined with practical 
solutions to improve and expand access for 
the blind and persons with other disabilities.

“A multilateral treaty is needed because 
other proposals, such as market and volun-
tary mechanisms, or a WIPO model law, do 
not offer a comprehensive solution to the 
problems that must be addressed and will 
not deliver the results required to change 
the current situation,” the comments state. 

“The treaty proposal offers a framework 
that accommodates a range of legal, market, 
and technological solutions that will enable 
the world’s blind and visually impaired 
persons to read and access culture on an 
equal basis with other members of society.”

Carrie Russell, director of the Program 
on Public Access to Information for ALA’s 
Offi ce for Information Technology Policy 

(OITP), says that while advances in technol-
ogy have enabled more persons with reading 
disabilities to gain access to the materials 
they need and want, an across-the-board 
policy is needed to prevent unnecessary 
duplication of materials as well as to create 
a comprehensive collection of works that all 
persons can access. 

“The reading impaired in the United 
States have access to only 5 percent of pub-
lished materials available to sighted people,” 
Russell said. 

“Obtaining these works in accessible 
formats is costly, time-consuming, and of-
ten ineffi cient. We need better mechanisms 
in place to ensure that accessible copies 
are created at the point of production, a 
proposal that has been rejected by the 
publishing industry. Instead, reading im-
paired library users and school and college 
students must wait months before a license 
is negotiated with rights holders to make 
accessible copies.”

According to Russell, even e-book 
technologies that allow the text-to-speech 
function are being rejected by rights hold-
ers because of the fear of cutting into their 
audio book market. 

“This is particularly confounding because 
the reading impaired want to purchase e-
books just as sighted people do,” Russell 
said. “We agree that market solutions would 
best enable the goal of ‘same book, same 
time, same price’ but rights holders are un-
willing to offer accessible products to the 
reading impaired. Our hope is that the WIPO 
treaty, opposed by the content industries, 
will compel rights holders to work more 
collaboratively with libraries and the reading 
impaired and also allow libraries the right 
to share accessible copies with the reading 
impaired in foreign nations whose level of 
access to materials is woefully inadequate.”

The full text of the comments can be ac-
cessed at www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch
/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/LCA.pdf. 

Jenni Terry is press offi  cer at ALA’s Washington Offi  ce, 
e-mail: jterry@alawash.org

W a s h i n g t o n  H o t l i n eJenni Terry