Disappointing: Obama Administration Won't Support Treaty For Helping Blind Get Digital Books

from the shame dept

JJ points us to an unfortunate story that the Obama administration appears to be siding against an intellectual property treaty agreement that would have helped blind and visually impaired individuals by allowing "the cross-border import and export of digital copies of books and other copyrighted works in formats that are accessible to persons who are blind, visually impaired, dyslexic or have other reading disabilities, using special devices that present text as refreshable braille, computer generated text to speech, or large type." As the article notes, exceptions to copyright law for the production of books for the blind is common, and effectively this would expand that to ebooks. Many had hoped that the administration would support it... but:

Assurances coming into the negotiations this week that things were going in the right direction have turned out to be false, as the United States delegation has basically read from a script written by lobbyists for publishers, extolling the virtues of market based solutions, ignoring mountains of evidence of a "book famine" and the insane legal barriers to share works.

It continues to be a massive disappointment that politicians keep bowing down to corporate pressure when it clearly goes against the very purpose of copyright law.

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Hybrid Vehicles Are Quiet -- Maybe Too Quiet, According To A Couple Of Lawmakers

from the danger-will-robinson dept

One of the side effects of hybrid vehicles -- a positive one, for most people -- is quieter operation traditional vehicles in some situations. Less vehicle noise sounds like a good thing, unless you're blind, so a couple of senators have introduced legislation that would direct the Department of Transportation to study ways to protect blind people and other pedestrians (via Engadget) from silent vehicles. This isn't a new complaint: we reported last year about how Lotus was experimenting with putting speakers in hybrids to play engine noises, although we thought it might have been a joke. But apparently Lotus was just ahead of the legislative curve. Still, we have to wonder, is making cars noisier the best way to protect blind people and other pedestrians?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Lotus Adds Fake Engine Noise To Make Hybrids Sound Like Cars

from the is-it-april-fools-yet? dept

There have been a few stories over the past few years about the fact that hybrid cars (or just plain electric vehicles) are somehow "too quiet." The complaint is that pedestrians and bikers who are used to judging the safety of a road by vehicle noise are now somehow in danger from these quieter vehicles. Even so, reading this story and seeing the related video about how Lotus has been experimenting with adding a speaker under the hood that makes a noisy engine sound certainly feels like an April Fools joke, or possibly a bit from The Onion.

No matter how many times I watch the video, I'm still not convinced that this is serious.

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