The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty: Facilitating Access to Books for Print-Disabled Individuals is intended to help governments of ratifying countries as they face a variety of legal and policy choices when deciding how to incorporate the Marrakesh Treaty into their national legal systems. These decisions will determine whether the Treaty realizes its overarching objective—to enhance the human rights of print-disabled persons by facilitating their ability to create, read, and share books and other cultural materials in accessible formats. It will also be a useful resource for disability rights organizations and other civil society groups, and print-disabled individuals themselves when advocating for the ratification and implementation of the Marrakesh Treaty.The Guide provides a comprehensive analysis of the Treaty, including an article-by-article analysis of key provisions, and specific legal and policy recommendations for giving effect to the provisions. The Guide views the Marrakesh Treaty as an international agreement that employs the legal doctrines and policy tools of copyright to advance human rights ends. It was written by academic experts from both the copyright law and international human rights fields: Professors Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji, and Jerome H. Reichman.The Guide is intended to be read either as a whole or selectively. For readers who wish to focus on specific topics, the Guide is written in such a way that each section should stand on its own without the need for additional background reading.The WBU Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty has been published by Oxford University Press (OUP). You can order your copy of the Guide on the OUP website.OUP has graciously allowed for an open access copy to be available on our website. This enables print-disabled individuals, including WBU members to have access to an online accessible version of the Guide. You can download the online Microsoft Word version of the Guide by clicking on the following link: WBU Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
How to access the WBU Guide in various languages:
The English version is the official version of the Marrakesh Treaty guide. However, it has also been translated in various languages for the convenience of our members. We sincerely appreciate the support of our members who volunteered to translate the document in the various languages. You can download the various versions by selecting the links below. All the versions are also available on our Spanish and French websites.
Links to the WBU Guides:
- English version: WBU Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty- English
- French version: WBU Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty- French
- Spanish version: WBU Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty- Spanish
- Russian version: WBU Guide to Marrakesh Treaty- Russian
- Portuguese version: WBU guide to Marrakesh Treaty-Portuguese
- Hungarian version: WBU guide to Marrakesh Treaty-Hungarian
- Czech version: WBU guide to Marrakesh Treaty-Czech
- Korean Version WBU guide to Marrakesh Treaty-Korean
The World Blind Union expresses its sincere appreciation to the following organizations that helped to fund the creation and production of this Guide: the Open Society Foundations (OSF), which provided significant financial support for Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Marrakesh Ratification and Implementation Campaign, of which this Guide is a key component; CBM; Sightsavers; Royal National Institute of Blind Persons (RNIB); Vision Australia; International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI); and the National Federation of the Blind India.
