What's wrong with TPP, the son of ACTA

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Carolina Rossini has a very good editorial explaining what's wrong with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secret trade treaty with punishing copyright provisions that's being negotiated by the USA, repeating the worst sins of ACTA and magnifying them (among other thing, TPP will make implementing the notorious SOPA into a trade obligation for the US).

As Rossini writes, this is no way to make good policy, and undermines the legitimate trade priorities of the US and its partners by entangling them in a dirty, secretive process that has no checks on the excesses of corporate representatives from the entertainment industry.

So, in summary, the USTR has released a public blog post about a secret proposal to expand something – a filtering mechanism on copyright limitations and exceptions – which might have real social, moral, and economic value. And all we know is that the only thing the authors of the proposal really wanted to make public was the fact that no matter what the content was, it was subject to enough international restrictions that it could be effectively gutted. The only thing 21st century about that is they used a blog to tell us about it.

Is the TPP - framed as a "21st century" agreement - the best way to build a 21st century society?

• [EH]

  So, were the USTR rumblings the other day, about being open to copyright term limits, just a decoy? One thing about this: can’t treaties be entered into without Congressional approval, that it’s an Executive-branch-only thing? Seems like a straightforward method to force changes in laws, since treaties are given the full force of domestic law (supposedly).

• [Stephen Schenck]

  What’s wrong with TPP?

  I can’t pronounce it. I’d suggest there should be a group for the Promotion Of Acronyms As Superior To Initialisms, but… well, you can see my problem.

  • [Jardine]

    It’s easy to pronounce. You start with this quote from Beavis: “I need TP for my bunghole.” Then you add on one more “P”.

• [Finnagain]

  It’s silly to have to use congress to write and pass our laws. We could save a ton of cash by just letting the corporations write their own laws. Maybe the buses would run on time.

  • [Roman Berry]

     Corps are pretty much writing their own laws now. Congress is just their proxy.

• [Andrew Singleton]

  As a content creator I have this to say.

  If this is the best you can come up with to help Us poor content making folk Legal Guys.

  Stop. Just please… Stop and let whatever happen happen.

• [Keith Panton]

  how about a trial 12 months, dropp all the legal hunts, dumb DRM etc for 12 months and just sell us the stuff we want to buy, without regional codes, delayed releases designed just to annoy people in other countries so much they turn to torrents to get em thru the wait before they finally CAN buy it….

  Then report back on how much you’ve  ACTUALLY lost compared to the year before.
  I’d suggest the increased sales would be hard to hush up :)  They’d have to admit it’s all about trying to cling on the control they had in the 80s and not about ‘theft’.

• [chrisharringtonjp]

  TPP is awful in a number of ways. There is in fact a Japanese translation of an earlier draft floating around on the web, based on which Japanese farmers are up in arms.

  One of the other significant problems with TPP is that it defines “different import standards” as trade barriers. For instance, in most places in the US, there is no requirement to label food products for the use of GMO ingredients, while there is in Japan. If TPP is passed, then Japan would have to stop labeling imported food that contains GMOs, and Japanese consumers will be in the dark and unable to choose, other than simply consuming no imports at all, which is hard because processed food does not label the country of origin for ingredients used in bulk.
  Forget whether you are for or against GMOs. Taking away the right of people to make their own decision about it is pretty nasty in my book.