Michael Geist sez, "For the past two and a half months, I have been writing a daily series on the trouble with the Trans Pacific Partnership. The 50 part series wrapped up today with the case against ratifying the TPP. While the focus is on Canadian issues, the series hits on problems that all 12 countries face: unbalanced intellectual property rules, privacy risks, dangers to the Internet and technology, cultural and health regulation, and investor-state settlement rules that could cost countries billions of dollars."
The TPP copyright provisions will require significant changes to Canadian law and limit Canada's ability to implement future reforms. The agreement will require half of the TPP countries (Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei) to extend their term of copyright at a cost estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The anti-circumvention rules (often referred to as digital locks) raise a host of problems: removal of flexiblity in implementing the WIPO Internet treaties, extension of criminal penalties for rights management information violations, expanding liability for circumvention for personal purposes, and precluding the ability for Canada to establish certain safeguards against digital lock restrictions as contemplated under current Canadian law. The problems with the copyright laws extend even further with the quiet expansion of criminal copyright provisions and the inclusion of U.S.-style notice-and-takedown rules that are viewed as "less speech-protective and more prone to over-enforcement and abuse."
The Trouble With the TPP, Day 50: The Case Against Ratifying the Trans Pacific Partnership [Michael Geist]
(Image: TPP Signing, February 4th, 2016 by US Embassy CC BY-ND 2.0)
