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Electronic books should be the easiest books for the blind to "read." Software can instantly translate the digital files into sound or Braille.

So why can't the 10 million Americans who are blind "read" the latest Michael Crichton thriller or George Pelecanos mystery?

A copyright law glitch, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, is the culprit. But fixing it could also be the key to changing the law's restrictions on using digital material.

A battle has been joined, pitting consumers like the blind and their advocates against the publishing and entertainment industries. On the one side, people with disabilities and digital rights advocates say the law is too broad, by limiting access to content and not accommodating advances in technology. On the other side are book publishers who argue the DMCA actually promoted the growth of e-books by protecting copyright.

And some say the controversy illustrates why the DMCA should never have become law in the first place.

Limited Access

The DMCA punishes people with disabilities, say some experts in law and technology. They contend it clashes with existing copyright laws and even the Constitution.

"This law has to be reformed," says Robin Gross, an attorney and executive director of IP Justice, an international civil liberties organization.

"Freedom of speech guarantees of the Constitution explicitly require that copyright holders do not have total control over" how someone experiences their work, Gross says. But she contends the DMCA reverses that right by allowing copyright-holders to lock a PC from giving voice to e-books.

Between 60 and 90 percent of the estimated 50,000 e-books available lock out text-to-speech software, advocates for the disabled say. Many of those are recent bestsellers, but even literature in the public domain for hundreds of years is locked under some e-book implementations.

If the e-books weren't locked, text-to-speech software could easily and quickly make the works available to sightless readers.

"It just is a tragedy," says George Kerscher, a senior officer at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, a nonprofit organization that converts written texts into audio books.

"How stupid are we when the information exists in a digital form and we've got to go through the time-consuming, laborious, expensive, error-prone process of having somebody scan it or re-key it?" Kerscher says.

Appealing for Change

Advocates for the blind are working their way through channels with their complaints about DMCA.

Easy access to e-books would be "like water in the desert" for the blind community, says Paul Schroeder, head of government affairs at the American Foundation for the Blind. "We want the opportunity to do what you take for granted."

Schroeder, who is blind, recently testified before the Copyright Office, urging an exemption to the DMCA. His organization and others want a way around the digital rights locks that prevent text-to-speech software from working.

The American Foundation for the Blind is asking the U.S. Copyright Office to exempt all e-books from DMCA regulations. The organization formally made the request during the regular review of the law, conducted every three years by the Library of Congress.

"Congress did not intend to undo fair use, but until the industry figures out how to support fair use, the DMCA should not apply," says Janina Sajka, a technology director at the American Foundation for the Blind.

Congress only intended the DMCA to prevent digital piracy, but the law is behind the technological curve and didn't anticipate the practical uses of digital content, she says. And at the time, the groups now seeking change didn't realize what impact the DMCA would have.

The entertainment industry and computer consumers wrangled over the definition of fair use when the DMCA passed in 1998. But its passage gave legal clout to the entertainment industry's use of digital rights management tools, such as encryption and digital signatures.

E-Publishers Defend Policy

DMCA supporters say there is no need to change the law or make exemptions, because U.S. copyright law allows nonprofit organizations--but not individuals--to copy literature so people with visual impairments can listen to or read it using Braille.

"The vast amount of material" is available this way, said Allan Robert Adler, vice president of legal and government affairs at the Association of American Publishers. He testified before the Copyright Office against the e-book exemptions.

The DMCA helped the infant e-book industry blossom because it encouraged publishers to put out literature without fearing digital piracy, Adler says.

But critics of the law say corporations are defending the DMCA out of greed, and that fear of piracy is not the real issue.

Ultimately, publishers decide whether to lock e-books, says Shafath Syed, product manager for electronic publishing at Adobe Systems. Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft Reader are the two most popular programs with the text-to-speech feature.

"We provide the technology but we don't control how it's used," Syed says. Some publishers "think if they turn on the read aloud feature that somehow that turns it into an audiobook. It's kind of a stretch."

Proponents of the exemptions say a computer reading an e-book out loud is the same fair use of a work as a friend reading a printed book to someone who is blind.

The market, not the government, should solve the issue, according to Adler. But advocates of e-book exemptions say they are trying to unravel what the government has already over-regulated.

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• copy protection,
• piracy,
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• library of congress,
• IP Justice,
• Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic,
• American Foundation for the Blind,
• Copyright Office,
• Association of American Publishers,
• Adobe Acrobat,
• Microsoft Reader