The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement ("TPP") is a free trade agreement currently being negotiated by nine countries: The United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Although the TPP covers a wide range of issues, this site focuses on the TPP's intellectual property (IP) chapter.

The TPP suffers from a serious lack of transparency, threatens to impose more stringent copyright without public input, and pressures foreign governments to adopt unbalanced laws.

Many of the same special interests that pushed for legislation like SOPA and PIPA have special access to this forum—including privileged access to the text as well as US negotiators.

Excessive copyright rights and enforcement adversely affect that ability of creators to create content, the ability of technology companies to make innovative products, and that ability of users to use content in new ways.

What’s in the TPP?

Well, since everyone but country negotiators and industry "advisors" have been kept in the dark, it's hard to say. But Public Knowledge has been tracking international IP issues for a number of years and a draft text was leaked in February 2011, so we can make an educated guess about what might be in the TPP's IP chapter.

(The agreement also covers a vast range of other issues, including tariffs on various kinds of goods, labor standards, telecommunications, and intellectual property.)

Here’s an educated guess about what may be in it and how these provisions might affect you and people living in other TPP countries:

Protecting incidental copies.	Kicking people off the internet.
The TPP would provide copyright owners power over “buffer copies.” These are the small copies that computers need to make in the process moving data around. With buffer copy protection the number of transactions for which you would need a license from the copyright owner would increase a great deal. One impact of this could be that the music you stream from services such as Pandora could get much more expensive when rights holders demand higher license fees to compensate them for the “additional” copies.	The TPP would encourage your ISP and the content industry to agree to institute measures such as three strikes—which kicks you off your internet connection after three accusations of copyright infringement—and deep-packet-inspection—which is akin to the USPS opening your mail. While we can not be sure exactly what is in the TPP, these examples are derived from a copy of the TPP’s IP chapter that leaked in February last year, the provisions that were reported to be part of earlier drafts of ACTA, and previous free trade agreements that the US has signed.
Criminalizing small scale copyright infringement.	Locking out the Deaf and Blind.
Under the TPP, downloading music could be considered a crime. Your computer could be seized as a device that aids this offense and your kid could be sent to jail for downloading. Some of these rules are part of US law. The TPP makes them worse and also imposes similar rules on other countries that don’t have them.	The TPP would prevent the blind from reading DRM protected ebooks and the deaf from inserting closed captioning onto DRM protected DVDs. In the US, the Copyright Office has made rules in the past that allows the blind to break this DRM. But the continuation of these rules is not a guarantee. And the other TPP countries could fail to make similar rules.

Of course, the provisions of TPP could be much worse. We will only know if the text of the agreement is actually released to the public, something the USTR has refused to do.

Meanwhile, many content industry representatives have access to the text and can work towards getting more draconian provisions into the agreement. If this process seems outrageous to you, contact the White House to let them know that such secrecy is not only unjustifiable, but unacceptable.

Recent Updates

Possible Inclusion of Limitations & Exceptions in TPP Good Step, by No Means Adequate

July 3, 2012

PK and others have argued for a long time that international agreements, including the proposed Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) must include mandatory provisions on limitations and exceptions. These provisions must promote fair use of works and also generally reflect the robust user rights that that US copyright system seeks to promote. Perhaps as an acknowledgement [...]

130 Members of Congress Speak Out Against Secrecy in TPP Negotiations

June 27, 2012

Over 130 members of the House of Representatives have signed a letter to the United States Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk asking for more transparency in the negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. Chief among their concerns was the lack of consultation with Congress. Given the broad range of policies the TPP is expected to impact—including [...]

What We Learn (and Don’t Learn) from the TPP Transparency Fact Sheet

June 27, 2012

The debate over transparency in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) rages on. Yesterday the US Trade Representative (USTR) released a fact sheet on transparency in the TPP negotiations. The fact sheet basically summarizes how the USTR perceives its transparency efforts to date and how it responds to outcry from members of Congress and the public that the level [...]

Les Nouvelles de Bruxelles: The Changing Politics of the Knowledge Economy

June 26, 2012

The following is a guest post by Burcu Kilic, Legal Counsel to Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, originally posted at CitizenVox. The politics of the global knowledge economy are shifting: from mercantilism to co-operation, from closed commercial regimes toward open source. Last week, the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA) passed a [...]

Why International IP Matters

International forums provide the perfect opportunity to increase the rights of copyright owners at the expense of the public because many of these forums often lack of transparency, the negotiations are obscure, and the debates are easily disregarded as "far away".

That is why, when seeking policy changes that would otherwise be unpopular domestically, well-financed industry players often turn to international forums. Once harmful provisions are codified in international rules, they are easier to adopt domestically, or if already adopted, harder to change domestically.

This phenomenon—using international negotiations to adopt provisions that cannot be adopted in the U.S.—is not new. The term of art used to describe it is “policy laundering.”

What’s in the TPP?

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

http://tppinfo.org/