Statement of KEI on announcement of consensus on Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement | Knowledge Ecology International
There are numerous concerns about the TPP. To begin with, the content has not officially been revealed; only portions leaked have been made public, and it is not clear that the overall document itself has been finalized. KEI’s commentary, by James Love, KEI Director, is short and worth reading.
With regard to copyright, Love writes:
“We are at a disadvantage to comment on the agreement, precisely because of that secrecy. We don’t know if the TPP will mandate a copyright term of life plus 70 years, change the global rules on copyright exceptions, block legislation to limit remedies for the infringement of orphan copyrighted works, require lower standards for granting patents, mandate patents on new uses of old drugs, require patent term extensions, block current U.S. incentives to induce greater transparency of the patent landscape for biologic drugs, mandate remedies for the infringement of patents on surgical methods, block the adoption of useful exceptions to test data, allow drug companies and publishers to challenge exceptions to rights under the investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in the agreement, or a hundred other issues of consequence.
These points that Love mentions are significant and not the same as the biological data provision that was evidently resolved though a compromise.
The problem with an accord like this goes beyond the dramatic dilution of national sovereignty, which is frankly not necessarily a bad thing, as some national states are more repressive than others: duh. Rather, it has placed policy creation and, to some extent implementation and resolution, in the hands of those organisations ablest to benefit from it. Right now, these would be multinationals who have the resources to create and destroy local markets.
newspeak 