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Accessible ebooks and Bookshare have helped sixth grader Kevin Leong overcome his reading challenges. The Bookshare library is made possible by a copyright exception: Section 121 of the United States Copyright Act, also known as the Chafee Amendment. The good news is that major changes in technology are reforming education.
For on January 17, 1984, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that consumers could tape their favorite TV shows and watch them later without the copyright holder’s consent. 417 (1984), also known as the “ Betamax case ”, is a landmark copyright precedent that has had enormous implications for the media economy. copyright law.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do to get my novels out in the world, and have been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow in terms of copyright (or, more accurately, copyleft ). Obviously for me, publishing eBooks is going to be something I do at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later.
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.
Four major book publishers have filed suit against the Internet Archive for copyright violations relating to the Open Library project , setting the stage for a major legal fight over one of the internet’s longest-running ebook archives. It’s a long-standing complaint from publishers and authors’ groups.
We’re against piracy, and have made commitments to authors and publishers to encourage compliance with copyright law. We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. But, when asked if we know whether or not there are “pirated” copyrighted materials, we can’t say. And then they go away.
And when the idea of a peer-to-peer ebook library came to me, it was George who I went to with the idea. After talking me out of calling it Bookster, he explained how the DAISY format would be ideal for our new Bookshare project, that he had made sure that it would work well for ebooks like the ones we were hoping to provide.
Last Friday I spent almost two and a half hours in a wide-ranging conversation with Maria Pallante of the Copyright Office (and two other folks whose full names I didn't write down). copyright exemption for serving the print disabled is commonly called the Chafee Amendment: Section 121 of copyright law. copyright law.
The world has finally moved beyond just electronically creating books that are then distributed as ordinary print books to actually delivering digital ebooks. In technical terms, this means that the next version of the DAISY format, version 4, will be the same as EPUB3, the main format used by commercial publishers of ebooks.
Next month, I will be heading to TOC a couple of days early in order to participate in a W3C Workshop on eBooks and the Open Web Platform, where I will be talking about Social DRM (Digital Rights Management). You can read much more about this in Jim Fruchterman’s blog post, “Upholding the Social Bargain: Bookshare and Copyright Compliance.”
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. In particular, they wanted the group to endorse that a copyright exception under Marrakesh exclude works that are commercially available.
I’m thrilled to share with you some of the recent amazing impact of Bookshare , a Benetech Global Literacy initiative and the largest accessible online library of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities. a11y accessibility Bookshare Braille DAISY ebooks Global Literacy print disabilities Reading'
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.
Check out this O'Reilly's announcement tat their ebook bundles now include DAISY talking book format files to see the fabulous work they're doing. Because Bookshare is only available for people who qualify under a very narrow copyright exemption. O'Reilly is again leading the charge. Why is this a big deal?
In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it’s a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. The ship has sailed.
Exciting new tools, including a free, open source Android ebook reader and a free web-based ebook reader along with an accessible bookshelf in “the cloud.” Thousands of ebooks pour into the library from over 168 publishers and textbook requests are fulfilled every month. In the U.S.,
A great (bad) example is Adobe, one of the leading ebook technology vendors, who just introduced their Digital Editions. Provisions designed to handle copyrighted materials could conflict with fundamental exceptions in copyright law like fair use of copyrighted works and the Chafee Amendment.
My take: Authors Guild: we want to insist that publishers turn off text-to-speech so our authors can make more money over how much they make from the standard text ebook. And, the Authors Guild is suffering because the NFB and Reading Rights Coalition has done a great job of articulating the differences. The RRC's motto is "No Need for Greed!
By partnering with all these stakeholders, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community. copyright law. We blew up the old approaches to converting inaccessible books into accessible equivalents.
We’re against piracy, and have made commitments to authors and publishers to encourage compliance with copyright law. We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. But, when asked if we know whether or not there are “pirated” copyrighted materials, we can’t say. And then they go away.
But, it's a dream that the commercial ebook vendors keep dashing. We have an action by Amazon that sets back years of work to make ebooks accessible. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act ("DMCA") workaround. I also have a Kindle1, and have bought a bunch of Kindle ebooks. The Textbook problem. The Closed Platform problem.
Betsy Beaumon, Benetech VP and General Manager of Bookshare During the event, our Bookshare staff offered demos of our Bookshare library and our Go Read accessible ebook reader for Android. They also demoed Read2Go, the accessible ebook application for the Apple OS and Route 66 Literacy, Benetech’s online literacy instructional program.
Five major publishers have sued Shopify over pirated learning materials like PDFs of ebooks and test materials, saying the e-commerce platform fails to remove listings and stores that violate the publishers’ trademarks and copyrights. To date in 2021, over 90% of copyright and trademark reports were reviewed within 1 business day.”.
We’re operating at the forefront of copyright limitations and exceptions, both in the United States and globally. The recent Indian copyright amendment that creates an exception similar to Section 121 in the United States, which makes it possible for us to set up a Bookshare-style crowd-sourced library in India with local partner NGOs.
This historic international copyright exception treaty paves the way for a future in which people who cannot read regular printed materials can have equal access to books, regardless of where they live. There is still much to do, however, before the treaty takes full effect. It is politically popular.
million eBooks available to borrowers without any wait times. The Internet Archive back in March created the National Emergency Library, a controversial program that made more than 1.4 The idea was to assist students through the remainder of the academic year and make it easier for ordinary citizens to access.
Today, Bookshare serves over 330,000 American students with a rapidly growing collection of hundreds of thousands of accessible ebooks. a11y accessibility blind blindness Bookshare DAISY ebooks education giving India Lavelle Fund for the Blind philanthropy print disabilities' government and states like Texas.
copyright law. By partnering with the Bookshare community, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community. Our lower cost model allowed us to invert the power structure.
Avoid Copyright Infringement. In Google, you also have the option to filter out copyrighted images under the tools section. For example, you can take 5 related blog posts and combine them into a massive ebook or white paper to distribute as a content upgrade. In terms of style, I like to keep things simple.
Few people want to read a 388-page book online, and I've received several notes from people who checked out the online version and then decided to buy a physical or ebook copy. Do you know what the numbers on the copyright page mean? I figured the same system would work for the book, and so far, it seems to be bearing fruit.
First, it makes creating a national domestic copyright exception an obligation of countries that ratify the Treaty. Second, the Treaty allows for easier import and export of accessible versions of books and other copyrighted works. How Does the Treaty Meet this Goal? It does that in two main ways.
These ebooks can quickly be turned into Braille, large print or be read aloud by a synthetic voice synthesizer. We’re grateful to our socially responsible publishing partners who give us world rights to their titles, even though they are not required to do so under international copyright law.
The miracle of ebooks What if we had the ability to overcome these accessibility barriers, barriers that affect most of humanity, not just people with identified disabilities, wouldn’t we have the moral obligation to act? We can use the same ebook file to deliver the content ten different ways. We can do better!
The latest session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) just concluded last week. But, we don’t think people with print disabilities should be denied access to library services just because the book is for sale.
All of this work helps us support the international effort for full implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty —a global copyright exception model that provides the legal framework for greater sharing of accessible books across national borders. What about yet another order of magnitude beyond that?
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.
What if we could scan once, proofread the resulting scan, and share that ebook with tens of thousands of eager readers? Gerry quickly did the legal research and came back to explain that my idea, which seemed like it should be illegal, was 100% permitted under an obscure provision of the copyright law!
The first was the ebook. Fundamentally, the Arkenstone Reader allowed blind people to create their own personal ebook as a text file that could be read in something like Microsoft Word. These formats now underpin the ebook industry of today. It makes a copyright exception like the U.S.
Bookshare Hits 100,000 Members Boy reading at a computer with teacher in the background.Since the beginning of 2009, we’ve tripled the number of people with disabilities Bookshare is serving with our accessible library of ebooks. If we’re going to speak truth to power, then we need to make sure that we are speaking truth.
This is a round-up of some of the free graphics tools that various folks have recommended to me including some sources for copyright free images. It also creates digital documents like eBooks, reports, PDFs, and webpages. Some of them are really easy to use and some of them are geared to professional quality image editing.
Copyright 2025 by Patricia Grabarek and Katina Sawyer. This book is available wherever books and eBooks are sold. Adapted with permission from the publisher, Wiley, from Leading for Wellness by Patricia Grabarek and Katina Sawyer. All rights reserved.
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