Copyright And Disability

Professor Blake Reid
Colorado Law
February 25, 2022
11:00-12:30 EST | 16:00 - 17:30 GMT | Virtual
Registration Required

Introduction by:

Victoria Phillips Director, Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, American University Washington College of Law

Professor Blake Reid will present his recently published article Copyright and Disability, followed by short comments from members of the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights and an audience discussion.

Abstract

A vast array of copyrighted works—books, video programming, software, podcasts, video games, and more—remain inaccessible to people with disabilities. International efforts to adopt limitations and exceptions to copyright law that permit third parties to create and distribute accessible versions of books for people with print disabilities have drawn some attention to the role that copyright law plays in inhibiting the accessibility of copyrighted works. However, copyright scholars have not meaningfully engaged with the role that copyright law plays in the broader tangle of disability rights. This Article fills a gap in the copyright literature by observing that recent progress toward copyright limitations and exceptions elides an ableist tradition in the development of U.S. copyright policy that subordinates the actual interests of people with disabilities to access copyrighted works to the hypothetical interests of copyright holders who may withhold access without reason. The Article argues that copyright limitations and exceptions should not be understood as an expansion of access to people with disabilities but rather as an important-but-modest reversal of copyright’s largely unnecessary presence in disability policy. That reversal leaves unresolved significant questions about how to actually make copyrighted works accessible that must ultimately be answered by disability law, not copyright law.

Presenter

Blake E. Reid, Director of the Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic (TLPC) and a faculty director at the Silicon Flatirons Center. Before joining Colorado Law, he was a staff attorney and graduate fellow in First Amendment and media law at the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown Law and a law clerk for Justice Nancy E. Rice on the Colorado Supreme Court.

Discussion Panel 

• Zakeria Mohammed "Zak" Yacoob
  Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
• Jack Bernard
  Associate General Counsel, Office of the Vice President & General Counsel, University of Michigan
• Caroline Ncube
  Professor and DST/NRF SARChI Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development, Department of Commercial Law, University of Cape Town