What I did on my summer holidays.

[Kirk Reiser]

A number of folks wanted a report about my attending the Daisy
consortium IPP meeting this week.  I will try to give an overview
although it was fairly confusing even to me.

A little background first of all.  In the U.S. there is legislation
known as the Chafy amendment to the copyright act which states that
for the purpose of materials for the print disabled anything may be
produced in an alternative format without getting permission from the
publishers.  This has been done up until now by producing those
materials either in braille (obviously an alternative format) and four
track 15/16th speed recordings.  The thinking there being that most
non-print handicapped folks didn't have access to that type of
specialized equipment.  Other countries around the world have
different laws but most of them are nowhere near as restrictive as the
states law.  To complicate things a tad more there are certain
institutions which provide their users or subscribers with periodic
subscriptions which need to be renewed for access to their
information.  There is also the issue of organizations wishing to
sell/rent books to print disabled people and provide intellectual
property protection (IPP) to the publishers supplying the materials.

Okay, our job was to try to come up with a mechanism to make digital
talking books different enough to be considered an alternative format
to meet the Chafy amendment.  We discussed a few different methods but
pretty quickly determined the best thing was to encrypt the materials
so that no one except authorized print handicapped individuals could
have access to them.  It was also decided that another level of
encryption should be available for organizations wanting to sell/rent
they're service.  Now, I have to say that this didn't go down very
popularly with almost all other countries except the states.  One of
the things I found most telling is that the publishers give lip
service to wanting to protect the authors but in fact really wish to
protect their own mark up of the texts in xml/smil.  They feel the
real worth is in their contribution to the material rather than the
original authors work.

Another thing people need to realize is the print impaired community
for maybe the first time has come up with a system which is the
cats-ass from a multimedia perspective and a lot of publishing houses
want to get their grubby hands on the technology or specification.

That's pretty much the situation as I know it.  It was a lot more
detailed as in we designed almost the entire implementation.  I worked
with a bunch of really nice folks from all over the world and I only
wish I had had more time to sit and talk about blindness issues in
those other places.  I will leave it up to Janina to correct any
blatant mistakes of which I'm capable of loads.  If folks wish to
discuss any of this in more detail you can ask me about it on the
reflector.

  Kirk