limitations and exceptions

On Friday 22 May 2009, I attended a workshop on Copyright Limitations and Exceptions for education and research environments at the silver springs hotel Nairobi.

The highlight of the 18th meeting of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCRⁱ) of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPOⁱ) has been the proposal today by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay of a WIPO Treaty for Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled Persons that was drafted by the World Blind Union and presented for discussion at the previous SCCR meeting last November.

Consumers International (CIⁱ) today released the results of its inaugural Intellectual Property (IP) Watch List: a global snapshot of how national IP and copyrightⁱ laws serve or subvert consumer interests.

This research considers how copyrightⁱ limitations and exceptions affect consumers. In some cases new limitations and exceptions for consumers have been introduced (as with Australia's personal copying exceptions, allowing for example format-shifting of music from CD to MP3 player), and in other cases they have been removed (for example, following US pressure, the Philippines repealed a compulsory licence for exorbitantly-priced textbooks).

The idea is to examine the impact of consumer-friendly limitations and exceptions on industry. Possible countries for the case study include: