A number of folks wanted a report about my attending the Daisy consortium IPP meeting this week. I will try to give an overview although it was fairly confusing even to me. A little background first of all. In the U.S. there is legislation known as the Chafy amendment to the copyright act which states that for the purpose of materials for the print disabled anything may be produced in an alternative format without getting permission from the publishers. This has been done up until now by producing those materials either in braille (obviously an alternative format) and four track 15/16th speed recordings. The thinking there being that most non-print handicapped folks didn't have access to that type of specialized equipment. Other countries around the world have different laws but most of them are nowhere near as restrictive as the states law. To complicate things a tad more there are certain institutions which provide their users or subscribers with periodic subscriptions which need to be renewed for access to their information. There is also the issue of organizations wishing to sell/rent books to print disabled people and provide intellectual property protection (IPP) to the publishers supplying the materials. Okay, our job was to try to come up with a mechanism to make digital talking books different enough to be considered an alternative format to meet the Chafy amendment. We discussed a few different methods but pretty quickly determined the best thing was to encrypt the materials so that no one except authorized print handicapped individuals could have access to them. It was also decided that another level of encryption should be available for organizations wanting to sell/rent they're service. Now, I have to say that this didn't go down very popularly with almost all other countries except the states. One of the things I found most telling is that the publishers give lip service to wanting to protect the authors but in fact really wish to protect their own mark up of the texts in xml/smil. They feel the real worth is in their contribution to the material rather than the original authors work. Another thing people need to realize is the print impaired community for maybe the first time has come up with a system which is the cats-ass from a multimedia perspective and a lot of publishing houses want to get their grubby hands on the technology or specification. That's pretty much the situation as I know it. It was a lot more detailed as in we designed almost the entire implementation. I worked with a bunch of really nice folks from all over the world and I only wish I had had more time to sit and talk about blindness issues in those other places. I will leave it up to Janina to correct any blatant mistakes of which I'm capable of loads. If folks wish to discuss any of this in more detail you can ask me about it on the reflector. Kirk
