Pop and R&B singer Stevie Wonder stood before the UN’s 184-nation World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) asking for global copyright restrictions to be modified. Wonder said, “Please work it out. Or I’ll have to write a song about what you didn’t do.”
Wonder advocates on behalf of a community totaling 300 million people. The actions of this committee would allow the blind and visually impaired to gain access to a larger pool of reading materials in genres such as academic science and commercial fiction. The UN stresses that it has been trying to restructure their current copyright framework for the past six years.
WIPO’s director of copyright and electronic commerce Richard Owens said: “‘The current legal framework means that institutes for the blind in different countries may be required to make multiple audiobook versions of the same work’…This leads to higher costs that are passed on to the listeners. It also limits access to blind and partially blind people in poor countries, which cannot afford to make their own versions of everything from science textbooks to best-sellers.” (Via Huffington Post)