The Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines said it secured wider access to novels, textbooks, and other printed materials currently limited in distribution and production by copyright law, for more than three million visually-impaired Filipinos.
The Philippines, on Dec. 18, 2018, deposited its instrument of accession to the Marrakesh Treaty to Director General Francis Gurry of the World Intellectual Property Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) in charge of administering the Treaty.
Ambassador Evan Garcia of the Philippine Mission to the UN and Other International Organizations facilitated the event.
The IPOPhl has been pushing for the country’s accession to the treaty, in a bid to increase trade in published materials in ‘accessible formats’ and institutionalizing freer production and distribution, since its adoption in a diplomatic conference in Marrakesh, Morocco on June 27, 2013.
An accessible format copy is a copy of a work in an alternative manner or form which gives a beneficiary person access to the work, including to permit the person to have access in the same way as a person without visual impairment or other print disability. Publications in Braille format or audio books, for example, are considered accessible format copies.
