TPP Uncovered: WikiLeaks releases draft of highly-secretive multi-national trade deal. HT:
RussiaToday.
'No wonder they kept it secret, TPP is about world domination for US corporations.'
Details of a highly secretive, multi-national trade agreement long in works
has been published by WikiLeaks, and critics say there will be major
repercussions for much of the modern world if its approved in this incarnation.
The anti-secrecy group
published on Wednesday a 95-page excerpt taken from a recent
draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a NAFTA-like agreement that is
expected to encompass nations representing more than 40 percent of the world’s
gross domestic product when it is finally approved: the United States, Japan,
Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New
Zealand and Brunei.
US President Barack Obama and counterparts from 11 other prospective member
states have been hammering out the free trade agreement in utmost secrecy for
years now, the result of which, according to the White House, would rekindle the
economies of all of those involved, including many countries considered to still
be emerging.
“
The TPP will boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and
investment, increasing exports and creating more jobs for our people, which is
my number-one priority,” Obama said during a
Nov. 2011 address. The deal, he said, “
has the potential to
be a model not only for the Asia Pacific but for future trade agreements” by
regulating markets and creating opportunities for small and medium-sized
businesses in the growing global marketplace.
Upon the publication of an excerpt obtained by WikiLeaks this week, however,
opponents of the act are insisting that provisions dealing with creation,
invention and innovation could serve a severe blow to everyone, particularly
those the internet realm.
Although the TPP covers an array of topics — many of which have not been
covered by past agreements, according to Obama — WikiLeaks has published a
chapter from a draft dated August 30, 2013 that deals solely on Intellectual
Property, or IP, rights. Previous reports about the rumored contents of the TPP
with regards to IP law have raised concern among activists before, with the
California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation going as far as to
warn that earlier leaked
draft text suggested the agreement “
would have extensive negative
ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process and
hinder peoples' abilities to innovate,” all of which is being agreed upon
without any oversight or observation. Indeed, the thousands of words released by
WikiLeaks this week has concreted those fears and has already caused the likes
of the EFF and others to sound an alarm.
The IP chapter, wrote WikiLeaks, “
provides the public with the fullest
opportunity so far to familiarize themselves with the details and implications
of the TPP,” an agreement that has largely avoided scrutiny in the
mainstream media during its development, no thanks, presumably, to the
under-the-table arguments that have led prospective member states to the point
they’re at today.
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower site who has been
confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for over a year now, had
particularly harsh words for the TPP in a statement published alongside the
draft release.
“
If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights
and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and
creative commons,” Assange said. “
If you read, write, publish, think,
listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or
might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”
Within the IP chapter, the partaking nations in one excerpt agree to
“
Enhance the role of intellectual property in promoting economic and social
development,” but elsewhere suggest that the way in which such could be
accomplished would involve serious policing of the World Wide Web. Later, the
countries write they hope to “
reduce impediments to trade and investment by
promoting deeper economic integration through effective and adequate creation,
utilization, protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights, taking
into account the different levels of economic development and capacity as well
as differences in national legal systems.”
“
Compared to existing multilateral agreements, the TPP IPR chapter
proposes the granting of more patents, the creation of intellectual property
rights on data, the extension of the terms of protection for patents and
copyrights, expansions of right holder privileges and increases in the penalties
for infringement,” James Love of Knowledge Ecology International explained
after reading the leaked chapter. “
The TPP text shrinks the space for
exceptions in all types of intellectual property rights. Negotiated in secret,
the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine and
profoundly bad for innovation.”
Opponents have argued in the past that stringent new rules under the TPP with
regards to copyrighted material would cause the price of medication to go up:
potentially catastrophic news for residents of member state who may have
difficulties affording prescriptions. Public Citizen, a Washington-based
consumer advocacy organization, has warned that US Trade Representatives privy
to the TPP discussions have demanded provisions that “
would strengthen,
lengthen and broaden pharmaceutical monopolies on cancer, heart disease and
HIV/AIDS drugs, among others, in the Asia-Pacific region.” Indeed, the
leaked chapter suggests drug companies could easily extend and widen patents
under the TPP, prohibiting other countries from producing life-saving pills and
selling them for less. Outside of the world of medicine, though, the
implications that could come with new copyright rules agreed upon my essentially
half of the world’s economy are likely to affect everyone.
"
One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations,
and the copyright parts of the text support such a view," Dr. Matthew
Rimmer, an expert in intellectual property law, told the
Sydney Morning Herald. "
Hollywood, the music industry, big
IT companies such as Microsoft and the pharmaceutical sector would all be very
happy with this."
WikiLeaks wrote in response that the enforcement measures discussed have
“
far-reaching implications for individual rights, civil liberties,
publishers, internet service providers and internet privacy, as well as for the
creative, intellectual, biological and environmental commons.”
“
Particular measures proposed include supranational litigation tribunals
to which sovereign national courts are expected to defer, but which have no
human rights safeguards,” warned WikiLeaks. “
The TPP IP Chapter states
that these courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence.”
According to the whistleblower site, the IP chapter also includes provisions
that rehash some of the very surveillance and enforcement rules from the
abandoned SOPA and ACTA treaties that were left to die after public outrage
halted any agreement with regards to those legislation.
“
The WikiLeaks text also features Hollywood and recording industry
inspired proposals – think about the SOPA debacle – to limit internet freedom
and access to educational materials, to force internet providers to act as
copyright enforcers and to cut off people’s internet access,” Burcu Kilic,
an intellectual property lawyer with Public Citizen, explained to the website
TorrentFreak.
SOPA, or the Stop Online Privacy Act, was abandoned last year after massive
public campaign thwarted the US Congress’ attempt to censor access to certain
internet sites where copyrighted content may be incidentally hosted. One of the
bill’s biggest opponents, Kim Dotcom of file-sharing sites Megaupload and Mega,
was quick to condone WikiLeaks for their release of the TPP draft and condemned
those responsible for drafting a bill that he warned would have major
consequences for all if approved, including residents of New Zealand such as
himself.
“No wonder they kept it secret. What a malicious piece of US corporate
lobbying. TPP is about world domination for US corporations. Nothing else. We
will stop this madness in New Zealand,” he told RT’s Andrew Blake.
According to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration and senior heads of state
from other potential TPP nations have expressed interest in ratifying the
agreement before 2014. All of that could now be put in jeopardy.
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