The theme for this year’s World AIDS Day focuses on preventing HIV transmission: “Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV Infections. Zero Discrimination. Zero AIDS-Related Deaths.” The first global health day has been observed on Dec. 1 since 1988 to highlight the fight against HIV and AIDS.

To celebrate, the World eBook Fair members are providing free access to over two million books between July 4th and August 4th.

Thanks to Rick Mason @ http://www.libology.com/blog/

Cory Doctorow talks about how the US is opposing a treaty to provide blind and other visually differently abled people access to material that would otherwise be blocked by copyright. Cory quotes Jamie Love, and I am going to follow his lead.

Jamie Love:

I am attending a meeting in Geneva of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This evening the United States government, in combination with other high income countries in “Group B” is seeking to block an agreement to discuss a treaty for persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

The proposal for a treaty is supported by a large number of civil society NGOs, the World Blind Union, the National Federation of the Blind in the US, the International DAISY Consortium, Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D), Bookshare.Org, and groups representing persons with reading disabilities all around the world.

The main aim of the treaty is to allow 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. These works, which are expensive to make, are typically created under national exceptions to copyright law that are specifically written to benefit persons with disabilities.

The number of accessible works is very small everywhere, relative to what “sighted” persons can read. However, in developing countries, the collections are super small, and even in the USA, access to works in languages other than English is practically non-existent.

Under the current international legal regime, there is almost no sharing of these works across borders. The treaty would change that, vastly expanding the availability of works to all persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities.

Every regional group in the developing world expressed support for advancing work on this proposal, as part of a broader agenda on access to knowledge and the protection of consumer interests.

The opposition from the United States and other high income countries is due to intense lobbying from a large group of publishers that oppose a “paradigm shift,” where treaties would protect consumer interests, rather than expand rights for copyright owners.

The Obama Administration was lobbied heavily on this issue, including meetings with high level White House officials. 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.

Last week Obama worked with PhRMA to kill a Medical R&D Treaty at the World Health Organization. This week he is trying to kill a treaty for blind and reading disabled persons. This is not encouraging.

Live tweets of the WIPO SCCR negotiations use the hash tag #sccr18. My live tweets are here: http://twitter.com/jamie_love

Cory’s plea:

Here’s where you come in: this has to get wide exposure, to get cast as broadly as possible, so that it will find its way into the ears of the obscure power-brokers who control national trade-negotiators.

I don’t often ask readers to do things like this, but please, forward this post to people you know in the US, Canada and the EU, and ask them to reblog, tweet, and spread the word, especially to government officials and activists who work on disabled rights. We know that WIPO negotiations can be overwhelmed by citizen activists — that’s how we killed the Broadcast Treaty negotiation a few years back — and with your help, we can make history, and create a world where copyright law protects the public interest.

I’m not particularly into the book publishing industry, but I read about the current American Book Expo and found this quote to be interesting:

Hey, the opening night keynote even features E-Street Band member Clarence Clemons, who is sharing the keynote with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, as they both have new books. The title of Clemons’s forthcoming title? “Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales.”

Cory Doctorow says: What I want to ask is, how did we end up with a copyright law that only protects critics, while leaving fans out in the cold?

…that’s good, I want to be home in case my kitchen floods again like it did this morning.

I should be making plans for summer…I don’t have a project list/timeline/idea of what the librarian’s priorities are for the semester.  The action plan isn’t finalized yet…so I don’t know about that. At least I’m going back to a regular 8:30 – 5 schedule…that will make it easier to deal with facilities, student supervison and training, etc etc etc.

I have always liked being the senior staff in charge of doing everything nobody else wants to do and “other duties as assigned,” but it has been a pain in the ass since I have worked a split shift most of the semester and 4 to midnight for finals.  I’m not in charge when I’m not here and if I work 4-midnight on a permanent basis (which is what I want) I have no intention of dealing with all the stuff that I took over when we lost the Library Office Associate position.

Maybe I should have posted this to the Society of Librarians Who Say MoFo

Great article on the lack of stick-to-it-ive-ness as far as students and research papers.

I have to admit, I love spoilers and I love that there is so much information available so quickly…I may have had to walk 20 miles up hill in the snow to peruse a card catalog, and strain my eyes looking at the teeny tiny print in various indices, and even type my papers on a manual typewriter…but I don’t necessarily want to do it any more.

However, I also see the point that some students in the modern educational system just don’t have the patience to learn.  This is the facebook, IM, connected 24-7 generation who was weened on the cartoon network and 30 second commercials.

Kirstin says:

However, the focus of so many assignments is the product and not the process that students often don’t even think that they’re doing the research equivalent of reading a spoiler. They’re just impatient and unengaged and trying to jump through one more hoop.

That, in my opinion, is an inherent flaw in the current educational system…and it’s not a flaw that can be blamed on the members of the “spoiler”  generation.