Friday’s release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) confirms our worst fears about the agreement.
And it dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn’t survive to the end of the negotiations.
Since we now have the agreed text, we’ll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself – but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like ‘x’ that may change in the cleaned-up text.
Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks and others.
Binding rules for rights holders, soft guidelines for users
If you skim the chapter without knowing what you’re looking for, it may come across as being quite balanced, including references to the need for IP rules to further the “mutual advantage of producers and users” (QQ.A.X), to “facilitate the diffusion of information” (QQ.A.Z), and recognizing the “importance of a rich and accessible public domain” (QQ.B.x).
But that’s how it’s meant to look, and taking this at face value would be a big mistake. If you dig deeper, you’ll notice that all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are non-binding, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.
That paragraph on the public domain, for example, used to be much stronger in the first leaked draft, with specific obligations to identify, preserve and promote access to public domain material. All of that has now been lost in favor of a feeble, feel-good platitude that imposes no concrete obligations on the TPP parties whatsoever.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
