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Blind People Won the Right To Break eBook DRM. In 3 Years, They'll Have To Do It Again
| 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.
| So advocates in the United States are stuck filing for an exemption to a 23-year-old law, signed a year before the founding of Napster and well ahead of the smartphone era, when a top copyright concern was kids ripping music from CDs.
In 2019, the European Accessibility Act became law in the EU. It will be enforced in June 2025, requiring all ebooks published in the EU after that point to be fully accessible. Some hope it could set a precedent elsewhere.
| https://cdn.loc.gov/copyright/1201/2021/2021_Section_1201_Registers_Recommendation.pdf
https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2021-23311.pdf
https://www.wired.com/story/ebooks-drm-blind-accessibility-dmca/
| DRM does harm in many ways, but only to paying customers. It should be forcibly abolished.
| >trantor.is
Also EU superiority proven once again
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| 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.