On October 9, 2018, President Trump signed into law a statute that implements the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled (Marrakesh Treaty).Footnote ¹ The implementing legislation broadens access to published works for persons with visual disabilities and paves the way for the United States to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty.

Administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the multilateral Marrakesh Treaty was adopted on June 27, 2013 at the end of a diplomatic conference convened in Morocco and entered into force on September 30, 2016.Footnote ² The treaty requires parties to implement copyright exceptions and limitations aimed at aiding the development of copyrighted works in accessible formats for persons with physical disabilities relating to vision or to the process of reading books.Footnote ³ The treaty also permits authorized organizations to share these materials across borders with authorized organizations or eligible persons located on the territory of other treaty parties.Footnote ⁴

Although the United States has not ratified the treaty as of November 30, 2018,Footnote ⁵ it has now undertaken all the underlying legislative steps needed to ratify and implement it. On June 28, 2018, the U.S. Senate unanimously both gave its advice and consent to the Marrakesh Treaty and passed legislation to implement the treaty.Footnote ⁶ A few months later, the U.S. House of Representatives also unanimously passed the implementing legislation, and Trump subsequently signed the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act (MTIA) into law on October 9, 2018.Footnote ⁷ According to the U.S. Copyright Office, the United States is in the process of preparing its formal ratification for submission to WIPO.Footnote ⁸

The MTIA amends the Copyright Act to expand a previous exemption that already permitted authorized entities “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.”Footnote ⁹ Specifically, the legislation broadens the exemption to cover all literary works and musical works “fixed in the form of text or notation.”Footnote ¹⁰ The act also allows such works to be reproduced in “an alternative manner or form,” rather than limiting duplication to specific technologies such as braille or digital text.Footnote ¹¹ Finally, the MTIA adds new provisions to the Copyright Act focusing on the cross-border exchange feature of the Marrakesh Treaty. These new provisions permit authorized entities to export the reproduced works as set forth in the treatyFootnote ¹² and similarly permit authorized entities and eligible persons to import such works.Footnote ¹³

The Marrakesh Treaty constituted one of six treaties that, as of November 15, 2018, the Senate has approved during the 115th Congress, which began on January 3, 2017. Prior to approving the Marrakesh Treaty, the Senate had given its advice and consent to four bilateral treaties.Footnote ¹⁴ Two of these were extradition treaties with Kosovo and Serbia,Footnote ¹⁵ while the other two established maritime boundaries with Micronesia and Kiribati.Footnote ¹⁶ The remaining treaty to which the Senate gave its advice and consent was an accession protocol approving Montenegro's entry into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).Footnote ¹⁷ In addition to these treaties, the UN Convention on the Assignment of Receivables in International Trade has been reported out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for consideration by the full Senate.Footnote ¹⁸