Stevie Wonder to WIPO: get your copyrights out of my disabled rights

Today, Stevie Wonder attended a World Intellectual Property Organization meeting in Geneva to ask delegates to support the World Blind Union's proposed treaty for copyright exemptions for visually impaired and other disabled people. "Please work it out. Or I'll have to write a song about what you didn't do." (Thanks, Madrat, via Submitterator!)

• [Javier Candeira]

  Cory or moderators, there is an open <i> tag in the thanks for this message, it’s bolloxing the front page right now. Cheers, J

• [Anonymous]

  I’m hoping he decides to cover the old song “I’m alright Jack, pull the ladder up”, because this just smacks of ‘don’t persecute me; persecute them’ interest group exceptionalism.

• [jamiethehutt]

  Also the exemptions are only for visually impaired.

  I think what’s wanted is a pricing system for audiobooks that makes them close to competitive with paper rather than a far more expensive luxury item at almost 10x the price of a paperback version.

  • [Xen0Phage]

    Depends on the audiobook, actually.. Sure, they’re more expensive, but some of those audiobooks are incredible. I thoroughly enjoy when the narrator takes the time to do voices and actually act out the characters. Those are definitely worth the extra $$.

    And to be honest, you can get audiobooks relatively inexpensively through Audible. That said, I am no longer an Audible subscriber because they use restrictive DRM (even though it’s easily circumvented).

    Podiobooks is a great place to get audiobooks. You choose how much, if any, to donate to the author. Definitely worth checking out.

    • [jamiethehutt]

      I’ve been a podiobooks user for a couple of years now. :-D

      It’s good but if you want the latest Steig Larson you’re out of luck. Using that as an example the paperback version of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is £3.99 from Amazon and they have the audiobook version at £20.20, while maybe not 10x it is 5x the price. So if you’re not keen on braille (also god knows how much that would cost…) it get’s really expensive to be interested in literature.

      If I was arguing for audiobooks for the visually impaired I’d be arguing that they should be able to get them at the £3.99 price that a fully sighted person pays to enjoy the work, surely requiring the work of a narrator is no different from requiring a laborer to produce a wheelchair ramp… (That argument would probably sound better if I were an articulate lawyer…)

      Visually impaired are a group that are really in danger of being left out of the technological revolution, screens don’t really work if you can’t see them and unless people work with open standards screen readers don’t work (for instance text in a flash application cannot be read).

      Oddly enough eBook readers have actually been good for people with visual impairments rather than all out blindness, before they would of had to magnify text and/or get really close (that’s not a joke, I’ve actually seen partially sighted people reading 2 inches from the page…) but with an eBook reader they can put the font size up really large and read much more comfortably.

• [Enormo]

  There’s also the matter of Amazon shutting off the Kindle’s text to speech functionality due to pressure from publishers. Luckily, the Kindle has been adopted by a number universities resulting in violations of the ADA due to lack of accessibility. Now the pressure is heating up in the other direction.

• [Felton / Moderator]

  Heh! And my current favorite Stevie Wonder song is his version of The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” What a guy! (First time in a while I’ve used that phrase non-sarcastically)

• [Yana]

  As a disabled person I’ve always used this argument to justify file sharing to myself but the guilt and fear of prosecution is too great for me to actually use torrents.