Books for the Blind - you need to support this!

About 60 countries have exemptions to their copyright laws that allow copyright works to be converted into the special formats needed by visually impaired people, including Braille, large print and digital audio books  But these exemptions don't apply worldwide, and the special formats can't be transferred from one country to another.  The result is that visually impaired people have limited access to written material that most of us take for granted.  Even if a suitable format is created in one country, it can't be exported to another country.  Each country has to repeat the work again.  That is expensive, and that's why people with visual impairment don't have access to as many books as the rest of us.

Now a new international treaty has been agreed at a World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) conference which would solve these problems anywhere in the world.  But it won't come into force until a certain number of countries ratify it.  If the USA ratifies it, this would encourage other countries.  But there are people in the USA who don't want it to happen.  The main objector is likely to be Hollywood,  which has been lobbying President Obama.  Film makers fear that there the new treaty would be abused by film pirates.

I appeal to the best traditions of the USA.  Lobby your polititians now to ratify this vital new treaty.  If the treaty is adopted, if someone in Britain converts a book for the visually impaired in Britain, it would immediately be available to US citizens.  It would no longer have to be converted for each country separately.  And people in poor countries would have the  same access.

We aren't trying to steal your films to show to blind people!

The treaty is called the "Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled"

In Praise of Unsolicited Advice

This week, the big news in Britain is that Philip Gordon, the US assistant secretary of state for European Affairs, advised the British government to remain in Europe or face the probability that Britain would be less important to the United States.  Quite a lot of Brits got angry.

These folk seem to forget that Britain often express opinions about US policies.  In fact it is a national sport.

There are good reasons for this.  Every national election in the USA has a global effect.  When a new president is inaugurated, he (or maybe one day she) has to learn a lot about the world.  While they are doing this, they can make terrible mistakes.  Moreover, because all their advisors change with each administration, their advisors also go through a dangerous learning process.

Those of us outside the USA get some nasty shocks.  Mitt Romney’s blunders during his world tour gave me a few nasty moments.  How could he have described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel?  If he had been elected, his ignorance could have started wars.  And we non-US citizens can't vote in a presidential election.

Turning to Britain, we have a lot of people who want to pull out of the European Union because they think that the EU has too much power to influence Britain.  These are people who don’t understand the realities.  They think that Britain can survive in isolation – it can’t.  They think that European regulation is burdensome – it isn’t.  They think that Europe is run by an over-large bureaucracy – it isn’t.  They think that pulling out of Europe would affect nobody but us – but it would affect every one of our trading partners.

So when one of our largest trading partners says that a Britain outside the EU would be a less attractive trading partner for the USA, these folk need to hear this message.

Thank you, USA, for telling the truth.  That is what friends do when they see someone about to do something really stupid.