Marrakesh Treaty to initiate cross-border exchange of accessible work
The Philippines’ adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty will usher in the trade of foreign published works in formats accessible to visually-impaired and otherwise print-disabled Filipinos.
This was among the salient provisions of the Treaty explained and discussed by Paolo Lanteri, legal officer of the copyright division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), and Atty. Louie Calvario of IPOPHL’s Bureau of Copyright and Related Rights.
The Marrakesh Treaty forum is among the activities staged by the IPOPHL in celebration of April as National Intellectual Property Rights Month.
“Through this, authorized entities of other contracting countries to the Marrakesh can make available and distribute directly to authorized entities here in the Philippines, or even deal directly with the beneficiary person here. And vice versa for ACFs produced here in the Philippines, to other contracting parties ,” Atty. Calvario explained further.
“With this wider access to published works from foreign sources, the doors of information and education will be thrown open wide for visually-impaired and otherwise print-disabled Filipinos,” he added.
An accessible format copy is a copy of a published work in an alternative manner or form which gives a beneficiary person access to the work, including to permit the person to have access in the same way as a person without visual impairment or other print disability. Publications in Braille format or audio books, for example, are considered accessible format copies.
Authorized entities can be any entity explicitly recognised by IPOPHL to make and share accessible format copies. The rules on this recognition system, as well as other operational regulations is still under study by the IPOPHL Bureau of Copyright and Related Rights but is expected to be finalized by year-end.
Before the Marrakesh,there has been no international mechanism governing importation and exportation of accessible format copies.
The Marrakesh Treaty is the WIPO’s fastest-growing administered treaty in terms of enlisting membership, having garnered 55 notifications of ratification and accession in three years added Mr.Lanteri.
Stakeholders from the Resources for the Blind Inc., Philippine Blind Council on the Marrakesh Treaty,and the National Council on Disability Affairs were among the attendees of the whole-day forum.
The Philippines acceded to the Marrakesh Treaty on November 12, 2018, and the treaty came into effect last March 19, 2019.
About the Marrakesh Treaty
On December 18, 2018, the Philippines deposited its instrument of accession to the Marrakesh Treaty to Director General Francis Gurry of the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) in charge of administering this Treaty.
The Marrakesh Treaty is an international treaty aimed to ease access to print works in formats adapted for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. It does this by requiring countries or territories who adopt the Treaty, to give exceptions in its traditional copyright law.
Copyright law gives exclusive rights to authors on how their works are reproduced, distributed, and made available to the public. If a work is protected by copyright, no one apart from the copyright owner is allowed to reproduce, distribute, and make their work available to the public without the copyright holder’s authorization.
But by adopting the Marrakesh Treaty, contracting countries are expected to ease these rights in their domestic copyright law so that published works can be made into accessible formats without prior authorization from the copyright holder.
These accessible formats include but are not limited to, Braille, large-print format, and audio version. An accessible format is any format which allows access to a copyright work in “as comfortably as a person without visual impairment or other print disability”.
The IPOPHL has been pushing for the country’s accession to the Treaty, in a bid to increase trade in published materials in ‘accessible formats’ and institutionalizing freer production and distribution, since its adoption in a diplomatic conference in Marrakesh, Morocco on June 27, 2013.