In an excellent editorial, Michael Masnick explains what's so nefarious about the Trans-Pacific Partnership — the secretive trade treaty whose IP chapter leaked yesterday. As Masnick explains, the worst aspect of this treaty is that it locks in all of our present, overreaching copyright rules, effectively making it impossible for Congress and the Copyright Office to continue their present work on modernizing copyright for the digital age, and ensuring that they can never do so in future:
It's a lie in two different ways. First, there are multiple provisions in here that will absolutely require changes to US law. We'll discuss a few in other posts, but what's much more nefarious and downright obnoxious, is that this would lock in a variety of really bad copyright policies, making it nearly impossible for Congress to go back and change them. And that's a real issue, because, as we've been discussing, Congress is actually discussing copyright reform again. The head of the US Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, has proposed a bunch of changes to copyright law (some good, some bad), and astoundingly, just as Congress is at least trying to have the discussion about whether or not those and other ideas make sense, the USTR is looking to effectively tie everyone's hands by saying "these things cannot be changed," including many of the reforms that Pallante has directly proposed.
That's really quite incredible if you think about it. On the one hand, you have the very head of the Copyright Office suggesting some reforms, and you have Congress beginning the process to explore that. On the other, you have the USTR totally ignoring the sole power of Congress to make copyright and patent law, and effectively saying "you cannot make any of the suggested reforms." And then the USTR has the gall to ask Congress to give up its power to challenge specific provisions in the agreement? While we're concerned about the Congressional copyright reform process, at least it's being done in the open. The USTR has been hashing out the plan in TPP in total secrecy for years.
Who the hell does the USTR think they are that they can flat out override the Constitution and the Congressional process, and effectively block them in and stop any meaningful attempt at copyright reform? All done via a process driven entirely by a few special interests? It's anti-democracy. It's pure corporate cronyism by the worst cronies around.
The Most Nefarious Part Of The TPP Proposal: Making Copyright Reform Impossible
