THE 198 books were piled on a table and wrapped in chains; only two remained free. Blind people were helping the 600 negotiators at a conference in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh visualise “book famine”. The world’s 285m visually impaired people (40m of them blind), live mostly in poor countries where books in friendly formats (Braille, audio and large print) are scarce. A recent estimate is that Africa has only 500 works for blind English-speakers.

The Marrakesh meeting was to finalise a copyright treaty, of which the most important provision—according to Dan Pescod of Britain’s Royal National Institute of Blind People—is to allow blind-friendly books to be exported. Today’s copyright regime prohibits such cross-border trade. A Braille book made in America, for example, cannot legally be sold in Britain. Argentina has over 50,000 works available for visually impaired readers, but they cannot be distributed in neighbouring Uruguay, which has a paltry 4,000. Charities must therefore acquire the rights and pay for another conversion (which can cost more than $7,000). This takes time and wastes money.

In late 2012 the World Intellectual Property Organisation, a UN body, suggested that the treaty could be signed the following June. But copyright laws have powerful defenders who are suspicious of any precedent that might dent their legal armour and business models. They worry that negotiators might cite exemptions for the blind when they hack away copyright laws to benefit other causes—looser drug patents, for example. The treaty will also help charities sidestep copyright laws in the 127 poor countries without legal provision for blind-friendly formats.

The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO), a trade group, warned the American negotiator, the US Patent Office, of the “dangerous precedent” an agreement might set. Though the treaty hardly affects Hollywood, it fears that unclear clauses could be abused, says Chris Marcich of the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA tried to remove the fair-use provision in the treaty, preferring other existing rules which stipulate that “special cases” should not affect “normal exploitation” of a work, or “unreasonably prejudice” the owner’s interest. BusinessEurope, a lobby, wrote to the European Commission to try to delay the signing. Hollywood also rustled up support from foreign friends: Nollywood (Nigeria) and Bollywood (India).

A round of negotiations in April brought “disaster”, says James Love, head of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington-based charity, who helped draft the treaty. Although the talks had seemed almost finished, discussions reopened on 88 clauses. After a week of haggling in Morocco, careful wording ensured that the treaty was adopted on June 27th, three days after the books in chains were piled outside the venue. But for it to come into effect, 20 countries must pass it into domestic law.