The ayes have it, the ayes have it, the ayes have it. This simple phrase, which ended the proceedings of the Lok Sabha on May 22 marked a momentous day for the estimated 40 million persons with print disabilities in India. At 2.34 pm, the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012 was passed by the Lok Sabha — it had earlier been passed by the Rajya Sabha — thereby ensuring that people with print disabilities can exercise their right to knowledge on an equal footing with others.
The new law enables persons with visual impairment, dyslexia and other print disabilities, their families and friends, as well as non-profit organisations, libraries and educational institutions to take any book and convert it into Braille, audio, large-font and digital formats, without seeking the prior permission of publishers. The effect of this bill on the lives of millions can be understood by looking at the current problems that persons with print disabilities face in accessing reading material.
Under the earlier copyright law, publishers had the exclusive right to makes copies of their books. Since persons with print disabilities are not a large enough target market, publishers do not find it financially worthwhile to sell books in accessible formats. Which means persons with print disabilities cannot go to a shop and buy books like everyone else. Licences from publishers were required for conversion of books into accessible formats and other than a handful of publishers, most were unwilling or uninterested in granting licences.
As a result, it is estimated that persons with print disabilities in India have access to less than 0.5 per cent of the written material that is available to the rest of the country. Blind children could not study since they did not have text books; those blind people who defied the odds and completed their education could not find meaningful employment since they were unable to access reference material. Leisure reading was out of the question. These are the problems that the Copyright (Amendment) Bill seeks to overcome.
Even though the benefits of the bill are obvious, the journey to get here was neither short nor easy. The father of the movement to amend India’s copyright laws, the late Vinod Sena, a visually impaired professor of English from Delhi University, started the initiative way back in 2002. Remember that this was before disability had the mindshare it has today and the going was tough. But in 2006, after sustained campaigning by a group of individuals, the Copyright Office, under the then registrar of copyrights, Madhukar Sinha, proposed several amendments to the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, including a provision for the benefit of persons with disabilities. This version of the amendment had a fundamental flaw: printed material could be converted only into Braille.
Braille as a format has limited application. Persons who lose their eyesight later in life find it difficult to learn since their fingers may not be sensitive enough to distinguish the dots of the Braille system. It is also not useful for persons with dyslexia. In addition, with the advent of information technology and the invention of software that reads out the text on the computer screen, persons with print disabilities have turned to these in increasing numbers. As a result, conversion of texts into MS Word and PDF documents became essential. However, the amendment did not permit the conversion of printed matter into formats other than Braille.
Campaigners made representations to the Copyright Office in 2006 on the flaws of the proposed amendment. Despite the nationwide Right to Read campaign, supported by students, intellectuals, authors, publishers, and widespread coverage in the media, this faulty wording continued in the proposed amendment when the bill was first introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2010.
Thereafter, the bill was sent to a parliamentary standing committee. Organisations working for the disabled got a chance to present their arguments to the committee. The panel was extremely receptive and in its report, submitted in November 2010, it endorsed all those arguments and recommended that the Copyright (Amendment) Bill be rewritten to reflect such concerns. With the support of G.R. Raghavender, the new registrar of copyrights, the wording was corrected. And 18 months later, history was written.
The writer is founder, Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy, Chennai, and an intellectual property lawyer, express@expressindia.com