Copyright Stakeholders Dispute Effect of Capitol Hill’s Political Climate to Ratify Marrakesh Treaty
Stakeholders differ on whether increasing partisanship on Capitol Hill might affect Senate ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty on people with problems seeing having better access to print works. Some said in interviews this week they believe the so-called nuclear option (CD Nov 24 p4) for the Senate, which must ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization treaty, could add to an already fraught legislative environment. Others said they doubt the Senate rules move preventing some nominees from being fillibustered is pertinent to the ratification of the treaty passed at WIPO’s Morocco conference in June.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Fifty-one countries signed the treaty June 28(http://bit.ly/16LRyEc), which was a single-day record for an intellectual property treaty, said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International. That none of the signees has ratified the treaty isn’t surprising, since the ratification process is more complicated, he said. Many stakeholders believe the treaty won’t be ratified in the U.S. until 2014, said Electronic Frontier Foundation Global Policy Analyst Maira Sutton.
The National Federation of the Blind is urging ratification of the treaty. “This treaty will dramatically enhance the educational, professional, and social advancement of blind people in the United States and throughout the world by allowing more books to be produced in Braille and other formats and by allowing these accessible-format books to be shared across international borders,” said NFB President Marc Maurer. An NFB spokesman declined to say whether the current political environment might affect the treaty’s ratification.
Politics on the Hill are “really contentious already,” said Eric Bridges, director-advocacy for the American Council of the Blind. He called the nuclear option a “power grab.” The U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) treaty should be ratified “before we can really start to take stock of where things are, given the current climate” politically, said Bridges.
The treaty ratification process could become more difficult with the nuclear option, said Jonathan Band of law firm website Policybandwidth. The nuclear option and the treaty ratification process are different issues, he said, but “at some level, everything connects.” Policybandwidth is a law firm specializing in legislative copyright issues for library associations and Internet companies.
Whether the nuclear option is “really relevant to the issue” is doubtful, said Love. Some in the disability community favor the ratification of the CRPD before the Marrakesh Treaty, based on his conversations with those in the community, he said. Love said the real question isn’t whether the Marrakesh Treaty will be ratified, but “how it’s ratified.”
EFF wants to “see this treaty get ratified by all the countries that have signed it, including the EU,” said Sutton. She said the group hopes “it marks the beginning of a shift towards greater user protections in the copyright system.”