Blind People Won the Right to Break Ebook DRM. In 3 Years, They'll Have to Do It Again (wired.com) 34
Advocates will once again be granted a DMCA exception to make accessible versions of texts. They argue that it's far past time to make it permanent. From a report: It's a cliche of digital life that "information wants to be free." The internet was supposed to make the dream a reality, breaking down barriers and connecting anyone to any bit of data, anywhere. But 32 years after the invention of the World Wide Web, people with print disabilities -- the inability to read printed text due to blindness or other impairments -- are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. Advocates for the blind are fighting an endless battle to access ebooks that sighted people take for granted, working against copyright law that gives significant protections to corporate powers and publishers who don't cater to their needs. For the past year, they've once again undergone a lengthy petitioning process to earn a critical exemption to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act that provides legal cover for people to create accessible versions of ebooks.
Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill. On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.
"As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost," says Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. "It's an afterthought." Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.
Baked into Section 1201 of the DMCA is a triennial process through which the Library of Congress considers exceptions to rules that are intended to protect copyright owners. Since 2002, groups advocating for the blind have put together lengthy documents asking for exemptions that allow copy protections on ebooks to be circumvented for the sake of accessibility. Every three years, they must repeat the process, like Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill. On Wednesday, the US Copyright Office released a report recommending the Librarian of Congress once again grant the three-year exemption; it will do so in a final rule that takes effect on Thursday. The victory is tainted somewhat by the struggle it represents. Although the exemption protects people who circumvent digital copyright protections for the sake of accessibility -- by using third-party programs to lift text and save it in a different file format, for example -- that it's even necessary strikes many as a fundamental injustice.
"As the mainstream has embraced ebooks, accessibility has gotten lost," says Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind. "It's an afterthought." Publishers have no obligation to make electronic versions of their books accessible to the blind through features like text-to-speech (TTS), which reads aloud onscreen text and is available on whichever device you're reading this article. More than a decade ago, publishers fought Amazon for enabling a TTS feature by default on its Kindle 2 ereader, arguing that it violated their copyright on audiobooks. Now, publishers enable or disable TTS on individual books themselves. Even as TTS has become more common, there's no guarantee that a blind person will be able to enjoy a given novel from Amazon's Kindle storefront, or a textbook or manual. That's why the exemption is so important -- and why advocates do the work over and over again to secure it from the Library of Congress. It's a time-consuming and expensive process that many would rather do away with.
Not like Sisyphus (Score:2)
Sisyphus never made it to the top of the hill. These guys make it up to the top every three years.
Find a better simile.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure someone could make a valid case for this being an ADA violation. If a business made reasonable accommodations by putting in a wheelchair ramp, and then tore down the ramp every three years, while still having an employee that requires wheelchair accessibility as a reasonable accommodation, then you'd have a much closer analogy.
I'm surprised (Score:3)
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The "permanent solution" here is that the publishers build an accessible product, not a carve out in the law by the LoC. I'm fairly surprised this isn't a thing yet--are the publishers restricting access to the text by screen readers because "OMG, my audiobook revenues!" or is there something else in play, here?
Re:I'm surprised (Score:4, Informative)
The moment you are dependent on the a corporation choosing to "be nice" for something you truly need, you are in a very bad situation.
Recall that denial of access is the default behavior (without dollars lubricating the process) of both corporations, and that corporations regard DRM as a security issue. The default of denial of access is a fundamental principle of security. Note that the law itself consider the denial of access to be the normal, default state.
Then too, legal departments are always looking for ways to justify themselves, looking for things they can do to protect "revenue" (or anything even remotely, potentially related to it).
Without the legal right of access, the loss of access at any moment, on a whim of a faceless, conscienceless corporation is an ever present danger.
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I'm not disagreeing with your position here, but if you want to go that route, you need Congress to pass a law. I don't believe the Librarian can do much more than they already are.
Given the number of ADA lawsuit cottage industry lawyers that have sued because "your website doesn't have alt-tags" I'm rather surprised this problem hasn't solved itself, which is what I was trying to say with "the permanent solution is that publishers build an accessible product." What these guys have been doing for a couple
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Given that blind people would probably be happy buying copies of said books but can't be guaranteed to do so if they have to effectively pirate it anyway, there's presumably a decent amount of revenue being lost because of all this. Unless publishers are banking on blind people being too poor to buy much legally.
Great (Score:2)
How about we get the right to legally copy our legally purchased DVD on our computer/phone/whatever now?
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How about we get the right to legally copy our legally purchased DVD on our computer/phone/whatever now?
Legal or not - I've already been doing it for many years.
Playing a movie from my streaming server is so much bloody easier than hunting down any particular DVD. And then there are the other advantages, such as not having to watch those unstoppable previews certain studios put on their releases.
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How about we get the right to legally copy our legally purchased DVD on our computer/phone/whatever now?
Legal or not - I've already been doing it for many years.
It's clearly illegal since DMCA, and also illegal in other jurisdictions such as Canada, pressured by the USA for "strong IP laws".
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
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When a law explicitly bans something I consider the thing to be illegal until a court says otherwise.
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Anuk - Path of the Warrior (starring Doro Pesch amongst others) is not available legally by DVD and, rumour has it, not available on pirate websites either. (It must be rumour, I wouldn't look. Would these eyes lie to you?)
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not having to watch those unstoppable previews certain studios put on their releases.
This is why even where I have the physical DVD I don't insert the disk into the player, I insert it into my computer, and use the "TV" as a monitor.
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Now you are just talking crazy talk. Communist! (/s)
the EU may just force it any ways to be open and t (Score:3)
the EU may just force it any ways to be open and then the usa store may just get the same open books that the EU store has.
Copyright is censorship (Score:3, Informative)
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The original law protected your rights for 7 years. Which wasn't really that long back then, in a time when you had to find a publisher to get your stuff printed, and neither printing or distribution were in any way quick. If you got from "I have this novel here" to seeing your book actually in a store in less than 2 years, that was fast. And unless you already were famous and your printer had a reason to believe that a second edition made sense, seeing that second edition before year 5 rolled around was no
Copyright needs an renew fee so that abandonware i (Score:1)
Copyright needs an renew fee to fix abandonware issues and to make the gov added funds.
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I'd say you get 7 years for free, and after that, if you still think it's worth it, renew it for a relevant fee. Quite a few titles would certainly be worth keeping in perpetual copyright, but for most things this means that they will get into PD far faster and allow for recycling into something bigger.
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Back in the day, if you wanted to steal a work of text, you had to go through a fairly laborious process including copying it out by hand.
Back in the day, if you wanted to steal a work of text, you would grab it and run. Copying is not stealing. The copyright owner still has their work; you just have a copy.
Your stance on its legality aside, why not just call it "unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work"? It's a lot more accurate and doesn't overload the definition of a common word.
Re: Copyright is censorship (Score:2)
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Because it's a mouthful and doesn't convey the idea that what is being stolen is an opportunity to distribute.
I still think it's better to call things what they are. If every time you refer to unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work as "stealing", you also explain that the theft was of an abstract concept ("opportunity to distribute" - presumably to the perpetrator, whom the rights holder assumes would otherwise part with money) and not a theft of the work itself, then I have no quarrel with the terminology. But calling it "stealing" without the footnote is a sneaky deception - a word used to trigger a visc
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Nobody was making a living selling bootleg books out of suitcases two hundred years ago
Wow, really, read a bit of history! There were whole scores of printing machines dedicated to reprinting books without compensation of the author. Weirdly enough, only the German, Dutch and Swedish Wikipedia have an article about it [wikipedia.org], so I guess you'll have to consult Google translate for an English version.
How about reversing it (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to show every 3 year why your drivel should still be protected by copyright.
Want to BET this gets addressed by the likes of the Mickey Mafia immediately?
For the money by the money (Score:3)
The fact that these companies were able to tell disabled users to go fuck themselves and get away with it scott free shows just how broken the US system has become.
And this extends far beyond media. Life is cheap, and theoretically nobody has the right to housing in the US. Food, water, and even air will come next (or at least they will try their damndest to do so).
And people why somebody would gun down their school or work chums and we see it more frequently as the years go by. Life is cheap. The rights of the monied outweigh the rights of everybody else.
DMCA violation spotted (Score:2)
Whoa there. Just because you have the right to break the DRM, doesn't mean anyone has the legal right to create, distribute, offer to the public or otherwise traffick in software to help you. LoC can't offer exemption for that. Whoe
You do not win a right (Score:4, Interesting)
You should never phrase conflicts such as this in terms of the government "giving" you a right. The government cannot do that. It can only limit or take away rights which you already have. In the vast majority of cases I do not have the right to kill someone; because my right to act as I wish is overridden by the other person's right to live. So the government has latitude to punish me if I kill someone. In this particular case, your right to copy text (a book) can be restricted by Copyright. But the publishers were overreaching and preventing not only illegal copying necessary to defend copyright, but preventing legal access so the blind and disabled could enjoy the copyrighted book.
The reason it matters which way you think about and phrase this is because the assumed default flips based on how it's phrased. If you think of rights as being granted by the government, then court decisions clarifying that you had that right can be made obsolete by at the whim of government. That is, blind people won the right to break DRM so they could read books. But changes in time and technology means that right needs to be reasserted, over and over again, forever.
But if a right is something you innately have, then it supersedes anything the government can do. Once a court decides that the government cannot restrict that right, then it cannot be restricted in perpetuity (until society decides to change the scope of government). Once a court decided that blind people could break DRM to access books, it would've become illegal for publishers to implement DRM which impeded access by the blind. With non-compliance resulting in fines, and eventually jail time. It's the publishers who would have to convince a court why a new technology requires them to be able to restrict access by the blind, before being able to implement such restrictions. They couldn't just implement it leaving blind people hanging dry, forcing them to fight to reassert their right again and again.
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I agree with most of what you're saying about "being given" rights (see signature) though I think you are on a bit of a slippery slope when it comes to where your broader argument eventually must lead (this is not to say that I personally am not on board with accommodations for the disabled, I speak only philosophically).
Traditionally a "right" is something you cannot be enjoined from doing. The last few decades, though, have promoted a new class of "rights" which are better defined as "entitlements" or ev
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A right is something that you innately have or can do.
This is not the generally accepted definition.
In the absence of other people, you could not read a book OR listen to a book because books would not exist. Pencils wouldn't exist. You would live a short brutal life in an unforgiving wilderness. The term "rights" would be meaningless, because you could do anything you wanted, but "anything you wanted" would be a cursed wish that you would certainly regret having been granted.
In the presence of other people, as the number of people grows, the probab
Easiest one to do (Score:2)
They just have to show up and say "Hey, we are still blind. We good?"
I mean really, you have to be the ultimate creep to try force blind people to pay up for audio.
Which laws need renewing? (Score:3)
I actually like the idea that a law needs periodic renewal.
However, I cannot fathom why laws that hurt the populace, i.e. the numerous US spying laws, do not need renewal whereas those which help the populace, i.e. this law regarding accessibility, do.
Seems backwards, no?
They're actually already doing that (Score:1)
https://www.loc.gov/nls/about/... [loc.gov]
(they're dragging there feet because they're in the process of redoing bards entire digital distribution system to pull the drm out, it's a massive nightmare)