On Thursday, November 17, 2016, Assistant Clinical Professor Blake Reid (鈥�10) and Technology Law and Policy Clinic student attorneys Kiki Council (鈥�17) and Sean Doran (鈥�17) presented the results of their work to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)鈥檚 Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.
The team provided an overview of a study they are conducting with Andi Wilt (鈥�17) and Caroline Ncube, law professor at the University of Cape Town, on the intersection between copyright and disability rights. The goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the intersection between accessibility for people with disabilities than we have today.
As policy and law in both areas continues to evolve over the next several decades, the study aims to help guide policymakers toward accounting for both disability rights and copyright interests in future decisio nmaking by assessing techniques that can be used to provide greater accessibility of copyrighted work to those with disabilities, such as:
- Closed captioning
- Video or audio descriptions for the blind/visually impaired
- Interactions with text and screen reader software
- Crowdsourcing and automated adaption techniques
- Manual adaptation systems and techniques
The student team is wrapping up the creation of a questionnaire that will survey WIPO鈥檚 189 member states on how some countries have already started to address these issues鈥攚hich in turn will help those that haven鈥檛. They will use the responses to draft the study over the spring semester, which will present to the member states in Geneva this May.
(scroll to SCCR/33, Thurs 17, English Afternoon Session, about 2:01:20.
PICTURED (L-R): Sean Doran, Andi Wilt, and Blake Reid.