The Hindu : Kerala / Kochi News : Meeting on copyright roots for the differently abled

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Saturday, May 16, 2009
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Meeting on copyright roots for the differently abled

Staff Reporter

It fails to arrive at a consensus on clauses relating to ‘limitations and exceptions’

Kochi: Curtain came down on a two-day national conference on ‘Copyright Law: Limitations and Exceptions’ sponsored by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and organised by the Centre for IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) Studies at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (Cusat) on Friday without much of a consensus on clauses relating to ‘limitations and exceptions’ (L&E) in the current law.

However, the range of concerns and recommendations thrown up would provide the government the platform to fashion its views for the coming Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).

SSCR meeting

Some kind of an agreement could still be arrived at on the issue of exceptions for the visually challenged and the differently abled, in general.

The SSCR meeting last November saw the World Blind Union hard-selling, with backing from countries such as Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Nicaragua, the need for norm setting in the area of minimum L&E to enhance their access to copyrighted material.

The conference, therefore, agreed that “the concerns of equity, education, and opportunity for the disabled dominate public policy space in developing countries, including India…it is time to incorporate specific L&E for the disabled with the objective of enhancing equality of access to them”.

There was, however, no accord on the model to be emulated.

Suggestion

There was a suggestion to adopt the United Kingdom model of one-for-one exception whereby a differently abled person would be entitled to seek assistance of anyone to make a format shifted copy if the person helping the disabled has legitimate access to a master copy and that the format shifted copy is not made for profit.

Earlier, Professor Madhukar Sinha from the Centre for WTO Studies posed the plethora of issues facing the visually challenged in India and remarked that a good percentage of the world blind population resided in India.

He also signalled the need for a provision for them in the Indian Copyright Act (ICA).

Pointing at the flipside, he said when new formats were designed for the visually challenged, they were being used for entirely different purposes.

As for lacunae in the existing law, it was agreed that the concept of fair dealing itself was unclear and that the Nouveau media such as sound recordings, cinematograph films and computer programmes should be brought into the ambit of the ICA.

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