Secret, undemocratic trade agreements could put shackles on our free open Internet and they need to be stopped before they do.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement is being negotiated behind closed doors in a process that not only excludes civil society and public, elected representatives that already have proper security clearance are denied the ability to view and participate in the negotiations.
Meanwhile, corporate representatives have full access to the text online. This process is not only lacks any transparency, it’s completely incompatible with our democratic notion of society.
The TPP carries provisions that would enact the global norms of copyright policy lobbied for by content industry lobbyists.
Those provisions would override sovereign national laws and prevent countries from passing, or even retaining, pragmatic copyright legislation appropriate for their own national needs.
It’s a secretive plurilateral agreement that includes provisions dealing with intellectual property (IP) including online copyright enforcement, anti-circumvention measures, and liability for Internet intermediaries like Internet service providers and hosting providers.
Due to the secrecy of the negotiations, we don’t know what’s in the current version of the TPP’s IP chapter; the general public has only seen a leaked February 2011 version of the U.S. IP chapter proposal. Given the corrupt process we’ve observed and what we've seen in this leak, we have every right to be furious that government representatives are negotiating an agreement that will harm online expression, privacy, and innovation on the Internet.
Within the past month, Canada and Mexico have been invited to join the agreement. So while 11 countries are currently involved, the TPP will likely continue to expand to include other nations.
Worst of all, it creates a global standard of intellectual property enforcement that is even more flawed than the broken copyright laws established in the United States.
Read more: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/internet-users-again-shut-out-secret-tpp-negotiations
