OMG & WTF????
Yesterday, Wikileaks published the secret negotiated draft text for the entire TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter.
“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. 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.”
More below the squiggle.
But wait! It gets worse:
Since the beginning of the TPP negotiations, the process of drafting and negotiating the treaty’s chapters has been shrouded in an unprecedented level of secrecy. Access to drafts of the TPP chapters is shielded from the general public. Members of the US Congress are only able to view selected portions of treaty-related documents in highly restrictive conditions and under strict supervision. It has been previously revealed that only three individuals in each TPP nation have access to the full text of the agreement, while 600 ’trade advisers’ – lobbyists guarding the interests of large US corporations such as Chevron, Halliburton, Monsanto and Walmart – are granted privileged access to crucial sections of the treaty text.
Just as Bill Clinton willingly and willfully sold the nation down the river by signing NAFTA, President Obama and
the most transparent administration in history seem poised to wrap a trade agreement albatross about the necks of working people around the globe in order to satisfy the increasingly demented intellectual property demands of the 1%:
The 95-page, 30,000-word IP Chapter lays out provisions for instituting a far-reaching, transnational legal and enforcement regime, modifying or replacing existing laws in TPP member states. The Chapter’s subsections include agreements relating to patents (who may produce goods or drugs), copyright (who may transmit information), trademarks (who may describe information or goods as authentic) and industrial design.
The longest section of the Chapter – ’Enforcement’ – is devoted to detailing new policing measures, with 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. The TPP IP Chapter states that these courts can conduct hearings with secret evidence. The IP Chapter also replicates many of the surveillance and enforcement provisions from the shelved SOPA and ACTA treaties
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These folks will not be satisfied until the very air we breathe and water we drink is commodified and monetized, our every thought and communication monitored and analyzed and our movement and location on the planet surveiled. We're not even allowed to know about it while it's being done (frog in the pot), and our elected representatives in Congress are thwarted should any one of them have an interest in protecting us from the rapacity of the corporate overlords.
More on Congress and the TPP at Liberty Equality Fraternity and Trees' excellent Diary HERE
Who hired this guy, anyway? Oh, right, we did.
FULL TEXT OF THE DRAFT AVAILABLE HERE