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Upholding The Social Bargain: Bookshare and Copyright Compliance

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

copyright law. The Section 121 copyright exception (often known as the Chafee Amendment after the Senator who introduced it in 1996) makes it possible for Benetech to scan just about any book and make it available to this community. The publishing industry and disability organizations both agreed on this provision of copyright law.

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Social DRM: It’s About Equal Access for All

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Our commitment is to provide access to books for those who are unable to read a traditional print format and to do so without harming the economic interests of authors and publishers. You can read much more about this in Jim Fruchterman’s blog post, “Upholding the Social Bargain: Bookshare and Copyright Compliance.” See you there!

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Commercial Availability: The Poison Pill for Marrakesh Treaty Implementation

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

That’s the lobbying position of some companies in the intellectual property field when implementing the new Marrakesh Copyright Treaty. Libraries for people who are blind or dyslexic are the primary source of accessible books in audio, large print or braille. We simply act to ensure the person who needs an accessible book can get it.

Copyright 100
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Austria conference on access technology

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This is an academic conference on access technology, full of researchers trying out new things that will help people with disabilities. My first day was hanging out at the Young Researchers seminar, which was organized by Professors Paul Blenkhorn (the UK's first professor of access tech) and the ICCHP host Klaus Miesenberger.

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Bookshare without Borders: #1/3

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

While we’re extremely proud of our achievements in the field of accessibility and disability rights, we know that we’ve just scratched the surface of what we could possibly do to bolster parity of access to information by people with disabilities. We’re making securing new funding for Bookshare’s international expansion a top priority!

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The Struggle for Book Access: Amazon (Blog Post #2)

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

But, we just saw Amazon fold when the Authors Guild pushed them to turn off the voice of these books: Amazon to flip on Kindle. And that is setting back the cause of people with disabilities who need that kind of access. We have an action by Amazon that sets back years of work to make ebooks accessible. The Textbook problem.

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Guest Post: Collections Access - Open the Door Wider

Museum 2.0

are well versed in new ideas for audience engagement and committed to opening up their institutions to increase public access. Some collections stewards, steeped as they are in professional artifact-protection standards, are reluctant to shift toward the more open version of institutional access that engagement advocates promote.