Stevie Wonder Lobbies UN Over Audiobooks
Stevie Wonder has become a copyright crusader, lobbying the UN’s intellectual property division for better access to audiobooks.
In a speech to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the singer called for unified copyright rules that would improve audiobook access for visually impaired people.
More than 300m people “live in the dark” and want to “read their way into light”, Wonder explained to the 184-nation WIPO meeting in Geneva. At stake is the UN’s international copyright framework, which has been under revision for six years. Groups representing blind and visually impaired people argue that the current licensing system for audiobooks presents a major obstacle to education, and that they should be able to freely adapt texts into more accessible formats. “We must declare a state of emergency and end the information deprivation,” Wonder said.
Although his speech was just 10 minutes long, Wonder offered a compelling voice for activists’ arguments. Humming scraps of songs like My Cherie Amour and I Just Called to Say I Love You, Wonder explained that “people know the songs because they were able to hear them”. Other kinds of information were locked behind walls due to inaccessibility, or the cost of adaptation. “There are people who have probably even far more to offer than myself who are locked into this kind of prison because information is not available to them,” he said.
Wonder threatened to “write a song about what you didn’t do” if the WIPO failed to rethink the licensing framework. On the other hand, he said, if they enacted a solution within the next 12 months, “I’ll come back and do an incredible celebration concert.
“It’s on you. Do what you have got to do,” the 60-year-old said.
According to one of Wonder’s aides, only 5% of printed material is available in a readable form for the visually impaired, and the figure is much lower in developing countries. Despite advocacy by groups for the visually impaired, and by African countries who seek copyright loopholes for academic institutions, Europe and the US are wary of “weakening” copyright. Wonder said any new rules ought to honour those “who labour to create the great works that enlighten and nourish our minds, hearts and souls”.
Same Difference 
I’m not sure how copyright laws can get any weaker than the federal government having the authority to reproduce any published work in audio format and distribute it without compensation, input, or agreement from the owner of that work, which is what’s going on in the US (often without authors even knowing it’s happening).
This issue strikes me as one where it seems whatever is done, somebody loses. I’m totally for accessibility. But that accessibility should not come about by stealing intellectual property from its creators–authors should be compensated for their work in all formats unless they choose not to be.
Accessibility costs and most publishing companies cannot afford a government mandate to publish in audio format. If such a mandate were put in place, less books would be professionally published. If that mandate were to apply to self-published works, a lot less books would be published.
Writing is a business. Publishing is a business. Writers and publishers need profits to survive, just as singers and songwriters do. I cannot imagine how Wonder proposes to honor the creators of these works by assuming the privilege of adapting their works without compensating those creators or obtaining their input–as required for any other adaptation.
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