WIPO Negotiations on New Legal Instrument for Visually Impaired Move Forward

After five days of intense negotiations, members of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) made significant progress on the text for a future legal instrument aimed at improving access to copyrighted material for the visually impaired and print disabled. However, delegations were unable to reach a compromise on several provisions and left open the question of whether the instrument will have binding obligations.

The twenty-fifth session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) - held from 19-23 November in Geneva, Switzerland - was the second step in a roadmap recently adopted by the WIPO General Assembly “with a view to conclude or advance substantially the text-based work.”

In informal consultations under the guidance of SCCR chair  Ambassador Darlington Mwape of Zambia, delegations were able to find convergence on the preamble and in some areas of past disagreement, such as certain definitions.

Specifically, delegations agreed that the term “work” - which is necessary to ascertain what would fall under the instrument’s scope - should mean literary and artistic works in the form of text, notation, and/or related illustrations, whether published or otherwise made publicly available in any media. In this regard, an agreed statement will be drafted to clarify that audiobooks are included in this definition.

Members also agreed on the definition of the term “authorised entity,” which defines who will be allowed to make, obtain, and supply accessible format copies of works. According to the current version of the text, an authorised entity is one recognised by the government to provide education, instructional training, adaptive reading, or information access to the visually impaired/print disabled on a non-profit basis.

The definition also includes government institutions or non-profit organisations that provide the same services to beneficiary persons as one of their “primary” activities or institutional obligations. However, an agreed statement will also be drafted in this case, in order to clarify the scope of the word “primary.”