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Reply Comments on the Proposed Treaty for Access to Copyrighted Works

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

We filed the following comments to the Copyright Office's request for comments on issues about access for people with print disabilities. Many of the comments critical of the proposed treaty come from parties that object in principle to copyright exceptions, rather than having a direct stake in the issue at hand. Because of money.

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Accessibility Excitement in Geneva

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This is totally the “how sausage and law are made” view, so don’t read this unless you want to know more about global accessibility in detail! The ABC would wrap together efforts such as TIGAR as a sharing portal, capacity building efforts for countries trying to create accessible book services and looking at issues like licensing.

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Our WIPO Statement on the Treaty for Access for People with Disabilities

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Statement of Benetech to the 22nd Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at the World Intellectual Property Organization June 15, 2011, Geneva, Switzerland • Greetings from California’s Silicon Valley! Now, more than 30,000 current copyrighted books are available globally on Bookshare to thousands of users. •

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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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Bookshare to Convert Open Content Textbooks to Accessible Formats

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Accessibility is a huge asset of open content materials, which are frequently released under the Creative Commons licenses and are freely distributable. These new textbooks will be available to everybody, with or without a disability, for free, globally. Since they are open, we can get them and do the adaptations for accessibility.

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I Need a Good Lawyer

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

We’re operating at the forefront of copyright limitations and exceptions, both in the United States and globally. We’re deep believers in the benefits of openness, which means we publish open source software and create open content under Creative Commons licenses. We serve human rights activists in more than 100 countries.

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My remarks just made at WIPO today

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

with print disabilities, with more than 70,000 copyrighted works in our library, the majority of which have been created under the US copyright exception by volunteers, mainly people with disabilities themselves, helping each other. • We now have global permissions for around 8,000 copyrighted books out of our 70,000. •