Notes on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement from the EFF

Why You Should Care

TPP raises significant concerns about citizens’ privacy, freedom of expression and due process rights, innovation and the future of the Internet’s global infrastructure, and the right of sovereign nations to develop policies and laws that best meet their domestic priorities and enable access to knowledge for the world’s citizens.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is pursuing a TPP agreement that will require signatory counties to adopt heightened copyright protection that advances the agenda of the U.S. entertainment and pharmaceutical industries, but omits the flexibilities and exceptions that protect Internet users and technology innovators.

The TPP will affect countries beyond the nine that are currently involved in negotiations. The new TPP agreement will build upon a 2005 agreement between New Zealand, Chile, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam (the P4 agreement) but will include more extensive provisions on intellectual property and other issues. The TPP will set rules that will likely be adopted initially by the 21 member economies in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. The TPP is being negotiated by 9 members of APEC, and negotiators plan to finalize the “TPP concept” at the APEC Economic Leaders meeting in November 2011.

Like ACTA, the TPP Agreement is a plurilateral agreement that will be used to create new heightened global IP enforcement norms. Countries that are not parties to the negotiation will likely be asked to accede to the TPP as a condition of bilateral trade agreements with the U.S. and other TPP members, or evaluated against the TPP’s standards in the annual Special 301 process administered by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

This has been going on for a while, obviously, but the suckage has yet to cease.

(Source: maybejustified)