Marrakesh: From Book Famine to Global Treaty
In July of 2003 it was impossible to escape the news that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was about to hit the bookshelves. Record breaking preorders had been available for months, and many bookshops were planning to open at midnight on the day of the release to enable long queues of costumed fans to purchase a copy and begin reading as soon as possible.
Readers with print disabilities were equally excited for the book but, for them, the process of obtaining a copy in a format that they could read was far less straightforward, despite the best efforts of staff and organizations running library services.
At a midnight opening of one bookstore, amongst the queue of wizards and witches, were a few equally excited librarians purchasing several copies of the title. These were rushed back to a team of people who were waiting to coordinate scanning, proofreading, the generation of audio, braille conversion, embossing, binding of hard-copy braille in multiple volumes, and ultimately the dispatch of the accessible books. This monumental effort enabled accessible versions of the book to be available to patrons of the library a couple of days after the release.
For legal reasons, these electronic texts and braille files could not be shared between organizations, resulting in similar scenes taking place at specialist library services around the world and, in some cases, multiple times within a country. This was a massive duplication of effort, an avoidable waste of limited resources and, for many smaller libraries, there was a significant period of time between book launch and availability in an accessible format.
The obstacles faced in sharing accessible files for this Harry Potter title provided a glimpse of a significantly wider problem, something which came to be known as the book famine: a severe shortage of accessible formats that people with print disabilities could read. At the time it was reported that less than 5% of published works in developed countries were available in an accessible format, and for the 90% of the world’s visually impaired people who live in developing countries, the rate was below 1%.
Dipendra Manocha, the DAISY Consortium’s Director of Developing Countries, describes this from his personal experience:
When I started my journey to access books more than 30 years ago, finding a book that I could read myself was never easy and getting a book I wanted to read was never simple. As a blind reader, I could not just walk into a bookstore or library, choose a title and start reading. I depended on the books that organizations had been able to produce in accessible formats, so the choice was very limited. If the book I wanted had not been made accessible, in practical terms, it was simply not available to me.
For many years, organizations serving people with print disabilities had to invest a lot of time and resources in converting books, duplicating the work which may have already been done by another institution elsewhere. Even when an accessible copy was already available in another country, copyright laws prevented it from being shared across borders without permission from the rightsholders. This was a reality that only an international treaty could change.
Efforts Towards an International Solution
According to the European Union Parliament Report, the concerns that led to the Marrakesh treaty started as early as 1980s. Reports published by WIPO and UNESCO raised concerns regarding the lack of an international mechanism to facilitate access to information for persons with visual impairment to copyrighted titles; two main issues were raised, first the lack of an exception in copyright laws to make accessible formats of published works and second the absence of an international mechanism that allows their exchange across borders. But it would take decades for these concerns to develop into a concrete international proposal.
A significant step towards an international solution came in 2008 with the discussions of a potential treaty that would give access to information for people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired. The World Blind Union and Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) convened an expert group for this purpose. The fruit of this meeting was a proposed text of three pages explaining the proposal. As mentioned in this proposal, the purpose was to provide the necessary minimum flexibilities in copyright laws required to ensure equal access to information for persons who are visually impaired or otherwise disabled in terms of reading copyrighted works. Although the proposal was broader, the Marrakesh treaty preserved the central objective; copyright exceptions, cross border exchange and the beneficiaries of people with visual impairment or print disabilities.
This later would materialize into a proposal submitted to WIPO in May 2009 by Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay.
Submitting the proposal to WIPO was only the beginning. What followed was several years of sustained advocacy and negotiation. The World Blind Union (WBU), through its global Right to Read Campaign, worked with organizations of people with disabilities, libraries and other stakeholders to keep the book famine and the copyright barriers behind it on the international agenda. Campaigners used petitions, public events and striking visual messages to illustrate the problem. In some Right to Read activities, books were shown behind chains and padlocks, symbolizing the copyright restrictions that prevented accessible copies from reaching the readers who needed them. At the same time, representatives of the blind and print-disabled community participated directly in meetings of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), advocating for an international solution that would allow accessible books to be produced and exchanged across borders.
The advocacy effort brought together people and organizations. Members of the wider DAISY community were closely connected with libraries, blindness organizations and international networks involved in the campaign. Their experience in producing and distributing accessible books helped demonstrate that the book famine was not simply a technical problem: organizations could produce accessible publications, but copyright restrictions and national borders could prevent those publications from being shared. The campaign therefore developed alongside the formal negotiations taking place within WIPO. Stevie Wonder played an important role by appealing directly to WIPO negotiators in 2010, urging them to overcome differences and move the process forward. He would later renew this call during the 2013 Marrakesh Diplomatic conference, promising to perform if they reach an agreement.
Alongside this global advocacy, formal negotiations continued within WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). Member states discussed the proposal over several meetings, such as who should benefit from the treaty, types of works it should cover and the conditions under which accessible formats could be produced and exchanged. Gradually the proposal began to take shape as a potential international legal framework.
The Marrakesh Diplomatic Conference
After years of advocacy and negotiations, WIPO member states convened in Marrakesh, Morocco, in June 2013 for the diplomatic conference that would determine the future of the treaty.
The outcome was not guaranteed. One of the fundamental questions during the negotiations was whether the international instrument should be legally binding or take the form of a non-binding recommendation. Disability organizations continued to advocate for a treaty, while some countries were leaning towards a soft law. This article documents the debate, including the positions of the US and EU who initially favored a recommendation.
After years of campaigning and negotiations, some 600 delegates from 186 countries and 60 non-governmental organizations gathered in Marrakesh for the 10-day diplomatic conference to finalize the treaty. Following intense negotiations, what came to be known as the Marrakesh Treaty was adopted on 27 June 2013.
The adoption of the Marrakesh treaty was a historic moment. It was the first international copyright treaty to take a human-centered approach, putting the needs of people with print disabilities at the heart of the international copyright framework. It also represented an important step towards a more balanced approach to copyright, one that considers not only the protection of the rightsholders but also the rights and needs of readers.
From Adoption to Entry into Force
Adoption of the Treaty was a major achievement, but it was not yet in force. Twenty countries first needed to ratify or accede to it before the Treaty could enter into force. India became the first country to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty in June 2014, with many other countries following suit in the following years.
Ratifying the Treaty was an important milestone, but it was only the beginning of implementation. A large part of the book famine problem was legal, but the treaty alone could not make accessible books available. Practical efforts were also needed to produce accessible books and ensure they could reach those who needed them.
This is why the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC) was established in 2014 as a public-private partnership, managed and funded by WIPO, with the DAISY Consortium as one of its founding partners and an advisory board member. ABC was created to facilitate the translation of the objectives of the treaty into practice, building the capacity needed to get accessible books into the readers’ hands.
After the signing of the treaty followed the sequential signing of the individual countries. In June 2016, Canada became the 20th country to sign, reaching the number required for the Treaty to enter into force. Three months later, on 30th of September 2016, the Marrakesh Treaty formally entered into force, with a symbolic exchange between the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and Vision Australia.
This was an important milestone and the beginning of a new phase. The international legal framework was now in place. Now it depended on how the various countries chose to implement the Treaty and whether the infrastructure of accessible publishing in their domains would translate into more access for readers.
For Harry Potter fans and the next generation of reading enthusiasts, the measure of success was: could they now find and obtain the book they wanted to read in an accessible format, even if that book had been produced in another country?
This is part one of a three-part series to celebrate 10 years of the Marrakesh Treaty.
Continue to part 2: Marrakesh: Ten Years of Implementation
Continue to part 3: Marrakesh: The Next Ten Years
Return to the main Marrakesh Treaty article with links to resources.