[nfb-talk] new accessibility to materials

[Peter Donahue]

Hello Joseph and listers,

    What they're also forgetting to is that like Bookshare.org one must be a
registered member to borrow books in the first place and only registered
members can use RFB&D Books so why the extra nonsense of the key? Let us
also not forget that one must have hardware or software capable of playing
books rendered in the DAISY Format. If they would junk that key all players
could then access RFB&D Books and could be purchased from any vendor ending
RFB&D's monopoly on DTB Players. Then there's the problem one faces if they
purchase a player from a non-RFB&D source. They must then send the player to
them to be keyed opening another ridiculous can of worms. One can only hope
that we will benefit from this ruling and that practices like this will be
stopped.

Peter Donahue


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "T. Joseph Carter" <tjcarter at bluecherry.net>
To: "NFB Talk Mailing List" <nfb-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, December 03, 2006 12:21 PM
Subject: Re: [nfb-talk] new accessibility to materials


It's worth noting that electronic book isn't well defined here.  For
example, audible.com books are DRM-encoded and that DRM could prevent them
from being used in a lawful manner (ie, on a playback device that doesn't
support audible.com books..)  I'd want to go and read the text of the law
as amended before doing it, but this could make a piece of software that
stripped out the DRM from such books legal.

The same goes for Apple's ITMS-purchased audio books, for which software
already exists, but was illegal to use in the United States.  (Noting of
course that ITMS is only really accessible using a Mac with VoiceOver at
present, unfortunately, so it doesn't apply to most of us here.)


I can't imagine that this means RFB&D books will no longer need to be DRM
encoded.  The only reason I can imagine that they are now is that RFB&D
lawyers don't believe DAISY format as an open standard does not meet the
legal definition required to permit them to be exempt from Copyright
restrictions.  I still wish they'd follow more the BookShare model.


On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 12:36:34PM -0600, Steve Jacobson wrote:
> Mike,
>
> I don't know if anyone tried to answer this or not.  I was hoping that
someone with more of a legal background would do so.  However, from what I
know, the
> implications are that if someone publishes an electronic book that can
only be used with inaccessible software, but if it could be accessed if the
security could be
> broken, this would be permitted if the user were blind.  At least at one
time, there were some electronic books which were specifically locked up so
screen readers
> could not read them because the publishers felt this competed with their
separate audio editions.  In the past, there were many difficulties with
reading PDF
> documents because of security settings.  While this has been resolved to
some extent, it still occasionally happens.  I assume that this decision
could have
> implications there, too, but I'm no lawyer.
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