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"On February 10, 2012, the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) took the lead, and was joined by several other consumer groups, in submitting comments in support of a petition filed by Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc., Gallaudet University, and Participatory Culture Foundation requesting an exemption for certain classes of work from the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Two of these exemption requests relate to closed captioning - one for IP based media and the other for fixed-disc based media. These exemptions will allow third parties to add or improve closed captioning on video programs without having to get permission from the copyright owner. ...." (with link to the text of the exemption)

The linked-to text of the exemption request is remarkavly clear and could bevery useful model in similar cases in other countries.

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

"Uploaded by douglby on Dec 20, 2011 MP3 download: http://bit.ly/sPaDAN - Get my new album free: http://itsdanbull.com/face/ Like Dan on Facebook: http://facebook.com/itsDanBull Follow Dan on Twitter: http://twitter.com/itsDanBull Add Dan on Google+: http://goo.gl/b8N35 Subscribe to Dan on YouTube: http://youtube.com/douglby I want to send massive thanks to every single person who contributed to this video, you're all awesome. A number of you didn't make the final cut, but I value your effort and enthusiasm as much as everyone else. Let's keep the internet free. Stop SOPA."

According to a copy of the suit, Discovery charges that Amazon violated its patent for Electronic Book Security and Copyright Protection System. The patent, U.S. 7,298,851, was issued to Discovery Communications by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Nov. 20, 2007, per the lawsuit filing (PDF). It was initially filed in 1999.

The Authors Guild is pressuring Amazon to modify the Kindle 2 so that the synthetic speech function can only be used with the express authorization of the owner of the copyright of a work. A coalition of organizations that represent or work with persons with reading disabilities is organizing a protest to persuade the Guild to change its position. KEI supports the protest, and makes this statement on the Kindle 2 issue:

"1 luglio 2013 Antonella De Robbio Soltanto il 5% dei libri pubblicati nel mondo - meno dell'1% nei Paesi in via di sviluppo - è disponibile in formati accessibili per gli oltre 287 milioni di non vedenti e ipovedenti - in termini tecnici, visually impaired persons, persone con danni visivi - che non hanno accesso alla cultura nei supporti a stampa e in video, essendo inabilitate alla lettura per disabilità fisica. A fare fin qui da ostacolo il numero relativamente ristretto dei potenziali fruitori e, soprattutto, i vincoli posti dalle leggi a protezione dei diritti di proprietà intellettuale. Ma la situazione potrebbe cambiare: contro ogni aspettativa, si è concluso positivamente in questi giorni lo storico trattato di Marrakech, in seno alla conferenza diplomatica Ompi (Organizzazione Mondiale per la Proprietà Intellettuale, Wipo) tenutasi dal 17 al 28 giugno 2013. Il lavoro di lobbing dei diretti interessati, appoggiati dalla Chiesa cattolica che si è ufficialmente schierata a favore del trattato, non ha precedenti in termini di efficacia. L'Unione mondiale dei ciechi (Wbu) denunciava il rischio che quattro anni e mezzo di negoziati su un nuovo trattato per le persone cieche o con difficoltà di lettura potessero concludersi con un vuoto accordo "di facciata" o con un nulla di fatto. "Un trattato per i non vedenti o per chi detiene i diritti?" ci si chiedeva anche tra le associazioni bibliotecarie, dopo la sessione informale e la sessione speciale del Comitato permanente per il diritto d'autore e diritti connessi dell'Ompi."

Amazon's new world-beating gadget isn't the savior of the e-book, genre. It's a proprietary, market-protecting anomaly in a world of increasingly open standards and accessible media. Shame on you, Amazon. (...) The thing that e-books need, I'm convinced, is PDF. Secure, reflowable, customizable PDF. The reader devices need to be easy on the eyes, lightweight, and allow users to shunt any PDF to it, whether it's a specially formatted e-book or not. If I am paying $300+ for essentially a document storage device on steroids, I need to be able to put my own junk on it, too. (...)You might be lining your own pockets and making a few sales, Mr. Bezos, but you're also promoting confusion in the marketplace and causing division in the e-book space at a time when everyone else is pushing for convergence and open standards. Thanks for nothing.

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?