Print disability and U.S. copyright law
Under the Chafee amendment to U.S. copyright law, individuals with a certified print disability may be provided copies of copyrighted materials:
Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, it is not an infringement of copyright for an authorized entity to reproduce or to distribute copies or phonorecords of a previously published, nondramatic literary work if such copies or phonorecords are reproduced or distributed in specialized formats exclusively for use by blind or other persons with disabilities.
The HathiTrust has been planning to provide enhanced access and versions of the full text of copyrighted volumes to individuals who have a certified print disability under the guidelines of the Chafee Amendment. To provide such a service requires a means of identifying that an individual is eligible for this service, i.e. that the individual has been appropriately certified to have a print disability. If institutions or other appropriate attribute authority could provide an attribute to HathiTrust that indicated that a given person is eligible for print-enhanced versions of books etc. (i.e. has been certified to have a print disability), then HathiTrust could much more easily support such a service.
From http://www.hathitrust.org/updates_july2011:
Access for users who have print disabilities
.... users at partner institutions who are certified as having a print disability will be eligible to view the full text of all in copyright volumes in HathiTrust that are or had previously been held in the partner institution’s library system. In order to gain access institutions will need:
- To be configured for authentication to HathiTrust via Shibboleth, (see http://www.hathitrust.org/shibboleth)
- To have provided HathiTrust with information about their print holdings
- To have a local process by which eligible users have been certified as having a print disability
- To convey certification status through a new Shibboleth eduPersonEntitlement attribute
One possible approach to supporting this use case with an attribute value has been defined in the Shibboleth Login guidelines for HathiTrust:
eduPersonEntitlement (optional) -- to offer enhanced access to content. We will be using the entitlement to allow enhanced text views of all works (public domain and in-copyright) to users at member institutions who have a print disability. Note that this service has not yet expanded beyond its pilot implementation at the University of Michigan.
- http://www.hathitrust.org/access/enhancedText -
attribute value for users who have a print disability
- http://www.hathitrust.org/access/enhancedTextProxy -
- http://www.hathitrust.org/access/standard -