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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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Donor Spotlight: Lavelle Fund for the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

One foundation that has been a committed supporter of our work is the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. The Lavelle Fund exemplifies the tremendous social return that bold philanthropy can create. Embracing measured risk, The Fund has been willing to make early bets on Benetech, and has repeatedly chosen to invest in our prototype projects.

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Accessibility Excitement in Geneva

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Even though Benetech doesn’t have donor funding for this, our VP of Global Literacy, Betsy Beaumon, and I thought it would be worthwhile to attend this meeting. Getting some kind of licensing deal is critically important, because it will take many years for the Marrakesh Treaty to be fully implemented with its copyright exceptions.

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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. Our experience successfully building Bookshare under the United States copyright exception, which has no such commercial availability limitation, informs this strong opinion.

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Bringing Millions of Books to Billions of People: Making the Book Truly Accessible

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

I believe it is a combination of copyright exceptions and business model innovations. For the content of books, this flexibility is expressed in ideas like public domain, when the copyright owned by the author or publisher ends at some point. Remember how crucial the Section 121 copyright exception was to creating Bookshare?

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Big Meeting on the Treaty this Week!

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The goal of the Treaty is to make a copyright exception for the blind and other people with disabilities that stop them from reading print, and to make import and export of accessible content legal. Bureaucratic barriers to utilizing a copyright exception, as proposed by some publishers, makes the cost even greater.

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Bookshare to Convert Open Content Textbooks to Accessible Formats

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Our new announcement about the Department granting Bookshare supplemental funding to convert open content textbooks to accessible formats went over very well. Tags: print disabled print disabilities Kanter Wiley Flatworld copyright OERs Creative Commons Schwarzenegger Plotkin CC Bookshare.