In May, The World Blind Union and Adam Kosa MEP, chair of the European Parliament’s Disability Intergroup will host a conference in the European Parliament covering the rights of the visually impaired people to have access to reading materials. The aim is to establish a support base for a treaty, currently being considered by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), within Europe.

The treaty would establish limitations and exceptions to current copyright law for the non-commercial production and distribution of books that are accessible to the disabled. Currently, it is estimated that less than 5% of books published are available for the visually impaired and this number is estimated at less than 1% in the developing world. Current copyright law prohibits the distribution of braille books across national borders, leading to a great deal of wasted effort on the part of charitable agencies that transcribe books as the same books are transcribed multiple times. The provisions of the treaty would relax these rules allowing for greater international cooperation on the production of books for the visually impaired. The passing of a binding WIPO treaty would allow for a more coordinated effort at a European level, increasing the number of books that could be transcribed by eliminating duplicated effort.

The treaty is currently sponsored by a small group of Latin American countries and there has been no support from the EU as of yet. Calls from conference participants for EU support may fall on deaf ears considering the current intellectual property and copyright climate. The recently released draft text of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement  (ACTA), which is being negotiated behind closed doors by the EU and USA among others, aims to strengthen international rules on copyright infringement and seeks to criminalise non-commercial copyright infringement.

While the European Parliament recently voted against the ACTA treaty as it stood then, their main points of contention were certain elements aimed at combatting internet piracy which they saw as being in contravention of current European law. It remains to be seen whether arguments in favour of the WIPO treaty can rise above those for a stronger copyright and anti-counterfeiting regime. Perhaps the recent vote in the European Parliament will present a small ray of sunshine for the treaty and those who will benefit.