On October 17, 2008, Jim Fruchterman, the President and CEO of The Benetech Initiative, sent the following to the U.S. Delegation for the WIPO SCCR, in support of a treaty for visually impaired persons.

From: Jim Fruchterman
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 5:29 PM
To: Lois Boland (USTPO), Michael Shapiro (USTPO)
Cc: Mary Beth Peters (Library of Congress), David Carson (Library of Congress), Rober Watts (U.S. Department of State)

Subject: Strong support for a Treaty for the Visually Impaired

I understand that the U.S. WIPO delegation needs to hear more about domestic support for the proposed Treaty.  As someone who has been a strong supporter of this idea, and one of the most active participants in the sessions to create this draft, I want to provide you with my reasons for this Treaty.

For background, I’ve been the CEO of Benetech for over 19 years, Silicon Valley’s leading nonprofit tech company.  We are a leading provider of information technology to the human rights, environmental and disability sectors.  The US Department of Education and US Department of State are major supporters and funders of our work.  We recently won a $32 million Dept of Ed. competition to adapt our Bookshare.org project into the national digital library for students with print disabilities, serving them the textbooks, recommended reading materials, leisure reading and reference works that they need to succeed in school. We have received dozens of major awards for our nonprofit service, and I personally serve or have served the USG in numerous advisory capacities around disability, technology and regulation, including being one of the principal authors of the Section 508 federal advisory committee report.

Our incredible progress with Bookshare.org has been made possible thanks to Section 121, our exception to copyright for serving those with print disabilities.  Our constructive and engaged relationship with the publishing industry has engaged their trust, and many leading publishers have signed agreements to both provide their digital content to Bookshare.org directly as well as providing permissions to serve non-Americans with disabilities.  Publishers with blanket agreements with Bookshare.org include publishers that represent more than half of the titles on the New York Times bestseller lists, as well as Scholastic, our largest children’s book publisher.    

I see two major advantages of the proposed Treaty:

* It will provide all people with print disabilities around the world with the benefits that disabled Americans enjoy under Section 121.

* It will allow our organization (and other nonprofits like ours) to more easily serve people with disabilities around the world.  
 
We have a disability exemption in the United States that works, and works well.  I would hope that our government delegation would support the extension of this incredibly enlightened American innovation worldwide.  By serving the 1 to 2% of the population who cannot use (or usefully buy)  a printed book, we implement the core values in copyright: securing authors and publishers with the right to exploit their works while serving society’s greater interests (without damaging the publishers).  

I’m tired of trying to explain to disabled leaders around the world why their communities can’t have access to our Bookshare.org library.  You can imagine that they interpret this as a denial of their fundamental rights to literacy, rather than a straightforward consequence of the national nature of copyright law.

I’d appreciate the opportunity to expand on my case for support, or to respond to concerns that the delegation may have.  Thank you for your consideration.  
 

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
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