EFF: TPP Leak Confirms the Worst: US Negotiators Still Trying to Trade Away Internet Freedoms

[Hissyspit]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/tpp-leak-confirms-worst-us-negotiators-still-trying-trade-away-internet-freedoms

NOVEMBER 13, 2013 | BY MAIRA SUTTON AND PARKER HIGGINS

TPP Leak Confirms the Worst: US Negotiators Still Trying to Trade Away Internet Freedoms

After years of secret trade negotiations over the future of intellectual property rights (and limits on those rights), the public gets a chance to looks at the results. For those of us who care about free speech and a balanced intellectual property system that encourages innovation, creativity, and access to knowledge, it’s not a pretty picture.

Today Wikileaks published a complete draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement’s chapter on “intellectual property rights.” The leaked text, from August 2013, confirms long-standing suspicions about the harm the agreement could do to users’ rights and a free and open Internet. From locking in excessive copyright term limits to further entrenching failed policies that give legal teeth to Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools, the TPP text we’ve seen today reflects a terrible but unsurprising truth: an agreement negotiated in near-total secrecy, including corporations but excluding the public, comes out as an anti-user wish list of industry-friendly policies.

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The leaked chapter features proposals for setting a new “floor” for copyright duration, ranging from the already problematic U.S. term of life of the author plus 70 years to an incredible life of the author plus 100 years, proposed by Mexico. Such bloated term lengths benefit only a vanishingly small portion of available works, and impoverish the public domain of our collective history. The U.S. is also pushing for countries to embrace terms lengths of 95 years for corporate and 120 years for unpublished works.

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The leaked draft includes controversial language calling for laws prohibiting the circumvention of “technological protection measures,” also known as DRM. The U.S. has had such a law in place for over 15 years, and it’s been a disaster for free speech and competition, chilling the legitimate speech of innovators, filmmakers, security researchers, and many others. In fact, it’s so bad that President Obama and many in Congress have said it must be reformed. Just as much of the U.S. public is realizing our anti-circumvention law was a mistake in the first place, we’re not only trying to export it but also potentially impeding our own ability to fix it.

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[marmar]

1. K&R

The TPP must crash and burn.

[Wilms]

2. ^

[Armstead]

3. ....among other freedoms

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

4. I would love to see all the pro TPP peeps come out of the woodwork and say that

we should just calm down...that we haven't really seen anything yet so don't exaggerate.

[NuclearDem]

5. This crap really makes me sick.

Most open and transparent administration in history my ass.