New Draft of TPP Leaked - And It's Not Good & Interactive: How companies wield off-the-record influence on Obama’s trade policy 16OKT&28FEB14

A new draft of the tpp / trans pacific partnership has been leaked, and proves (as predicted) the USTR / U.S. Trade Representative is not representing the best interest of the poor, working and middle classes of America or any of the involved nations while negotiating this free trade treaty. It is nothing more than unifying and strengthening existing laws benefiting international corporations at the expense of the human rights and workers rights in all the nations who adopt this treaty. It increases the political power of these corporations as well as their profit margins. Individual nations laws on workers rights and wages, environmental laws, human rights, political freedoms and more will all be superseded by the terms of this treaty. The USTR is not insisting or even promoting American style regulations but is agreeing to and promoting the restrictive and repressive style regulations of the worst of the countries participating in the negotiations like Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei to name a few. Nobody in any of the countries involved with the tpp will realize any benefits from the treaty except international corporations and the megarich. Think nafta was bad for the American economy? Just wait for the tpp to hit if it is approved by the US Senate. From +Daily Kos and the +Washington Post .....

Thu Oct 16, 2014 at 11:09 PM PDT

New Draft of TPP Leaked - And It's Not Good

by Th0rn

Another draft text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)’s intellectual property chapter has been leaked, and it has even more alarming provisions than the last draft we know about.
The TPP is a free trade agreement being negotiated in secret among the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Peru, Chile, and Brunei. This latest text draft is from May 2014.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The TPP still contains text on DRM, ISP liability, copyright term lengths, and criminal enforcement measures, and introduces new provisions on trade secrets that have us worried."

Anti-Circumvention Despite an over-abundance of evidence that laws punishing circumvention of DRM do far more harm than good, the USTR continues to press other countries to embrace the U.S.’s failed anti-circumvention policy.... What is worse, it would likely impede countries from adopting laws...that provide a blanket exemption for DRM circumvention for lawful purposes.

Copyright Term Whereas in the previous leak a coalition of countries had proposed that the TPP should allow them to retain full flexibility in determining the optimal length of their copyright term, that proposal has now been excised from the agreement—the only option now on the table is a provision that specifies a minimum term of years. How many years that should be, ranging from life plus 50 to life plus 100 years, remains undecided.

Criminal Treatment of Trade Secrets A new, more detailed provision on trade secrets introduces text that would criminalize the unauthorized, willful access of a trade secret held in a computer system, or the misappropriation or disclosure of a trade secret using a computer system. This text goes far beyond existing trade secrets law, which in the United States and other common law countries is usually a matter for the civil not the criminal courts. No public interest exception, such as for journalism, is provided. In practice, this could obligate countries into enacting a draconian anti-hacking law much like the Criminal Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that was used to prosecute Aaron Swartz.

Liability and Enforcement On ISP liability the text remains quite contested.... This article provides ISPs with a safe harbor against liability for copyright infringements by users....conditioned on ISPs participating in a DMCA-like notice and take-down regime, where allegedly infringing content is removed from the Internet without a court order....
Also still contested are the criminal enforcement provisions. The issue is whether users can be held criminally liable for copyright infringements conducted on a commercial scale, for commercial advantage or financial gain. In the November 2013 text, the text was more highly contested by all 12 TPP countries, but now most of the disagreement lies between the US and Canada. The US seeks a broader definition of a criminal copyright infringement, to even cover acts that are noncommercial, whereas Canada only wants to apply criminal remedies to cases where someone has infringed for commercial purposes. If the US gets its way, then criminal penalties will apply even against users who were not seeking financial gain from sharing or making available copyrighted works, such as fans and archivists.

Public Domain For the first time, the parties have reached agreement to include an article recording their recognition of “the importance of a rich and accessible public domain” and acknowledging “the importance of informational materials, such as publicly accessible databases of registered intellectual property rights that assist in the identification of subject matter that has fallen into the public domain.”

None of these provisions are for the public good (except the nod to the public domain - but words are cheap). They're all designed to benefit a narrow slice of corporate interests at the expense of the broad public. Cancer drugs will be more expensive, older drugs will be kept longer from generic forms, it will be easier to patent the genes in plants for the benefit of huge agricultural corporations, investigative reporting will be chilled by the criminalizing of disclosure of information that has commercial value by virtue of being secret. This is insane.
It's corrupt self-seeking by special interests. And as long as they can keep the public from finding out what's in these new trade deals until it's too late, they're going to get exactly what they want.

Interactive: How companies wield off-the-record influence on Obama’s trade policy

By Christopher Ingraham February 28

As it negotiates U.S. trade policy, including the massive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the upcoming E.U.-U.S. trade deal, the Obama administration seeks closed-door council from its network of 28 trade advisory committees. These committees are made up of U.S. citizens and ostensibly exist to represent the public’s interests in these negotiations.
But the advisory committees are heavily dominated by corporate interests and their related trade associations. Of the 566 committee members, 306 come from private industry and an additional 174 hail from trade associations. All told they represent 85% of the voices on the trade committees. They attend private meetings with administration officials and get access to documents that the public cannot see.

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Interactive: Explore the make-up of U.S. trade committees »

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In contrast there are only 31 labor representatives on the committees, 16 from NGOs, 25 from government, and 14 from academia, law and other organizations. Most of these non-business interests are concentrated in just a handful of committees. All but five labor representatives, for instance, sit on the Labor Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and Trade Policy. Similarly, most government members serve on the Intergovernmental Policy Advisory Committee.
Fifteen of the remaining committees draw solely on private industry and trade associations. This concentration and segmentation of interests doesn’t exactly facilitate a diversity of viewpoints – labor talks to labor and business talks to business, but they rarely talk to each other.
To address these and other concerns, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman recently proposed changes to the advisory committee structure, including the addition of a new Public Interest Trade Advisory Council. The U.S. International Trade Administration is also encouraging labor unions and NGOs to apply for seats on the industry trade advisory committees.
The AFL-CIO is calling this development “very helpful.” Whether the reforms will satisfy the administration’s critics on Capitol Hill, who have long complained about the lack of transparency in the TPP negotiating process, is a different question.

Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center