The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared / What We Always Knew: The TPPA Is An Attack On Sovereignty, Intellectual Property And Healthcare Just For Starters
October 13 2015 | From: Scoop / NewAmerican / ActivistPost / Geopolitics
In every sense of the term, it is a corporate seizure at the expense of a citizen’s worth, because obviously, having extended copyright terms, paying more for pharmaceuticals, extending the length of patents, and attacking the generic drugs industry is exactly what the general public need
Diplomats, trade officials and delegations of the twelve negotiating countries behind the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement were always doing one thing even as their respective masters were doing another.
Related: "The Biggest Protest This Country Has Seen In Years" - 250,000 Germans Protest Obama "Free Trade" Deal
As the boardroom was carving out democracy and sovereignty, the executives were selling vassalage as well worth it. As President Barack Obama, mask off, was insisting on taking the globe, as far as it he could, further into an American trade orbit, free trade was being sold in all signatory countries as an automatic godsend.
“This is about increasing the ability of global corporations to source wherever they can at the lowest cost.”
- Michael Wessel, The Guardian, Oct 9, 2015
Secret during the entire phase of negotiations, it has only been the workings of WikiLeaks that has enabled global citizens to get a glimpse about what exactly we are in for. The intellectual property chapter has now been released in three phases, the first in November 2013, and the final on October 9, 2015.
The latter version, dated October 5, is the near, if not actual final product, one which will be sold to the twelve respective parliaments when respective ratification and domestic legislation will have to be enacted.
In every sense of the term, it is a corporate seizure at the expense of a citizen’s worth, because obviously, having extended copyright terms, paying more for pharmaceuticals, extending the length of patents, and attacking the generic drugs industry is exactly what the general public need.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation noted, the IP chapter “confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes few hopes we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn’t survive to the end of the negotiations.”
Related: The Final Leaked TPP Text is All That We Feared (See important excerpt below)
Regarding The Takedown of Alternative Media Websites Such as WakeUpKiwi;
ISP Liability:
The provisions on ISP liability (Appendix Section I), as we previously found in the last leaked text, are not quite as permissive as we hoped. It will still require most countries to adopt a version of the flawed U.S. DMCA notice-and-takedown system, albeit with a few safeguards such as penalties for those who issue wrongful takedown notices, and allowing (but not requiring) a Japanese-style system of verification of takedown notices by an independent body of ISPs and rightsholders.
It is true that Canada’s notice-and-notice regime is also allowed, but effectively only for Canada - no other country that did not have an equivalent system as of the date of the agreement is allowed to benefit from that flexibility. Even in Canada’s case, this largesse is only afforded because of the other enforcement measures that rightsholders enjoy there - such as a tough regime of secondary liability for authorization of copyright infringement.
Similarly Chile’s system under which ISPs are not required to take down content without a judicial order is explicitly grandfathered in, but no other country joining the TPP in the future will be allowed to have a similar system.
In addition, although there is no explicit requirement for a graduated response regime of copyright penalties against users, ISPs are still roped in as copyright enforcers with the vague requirement (Appendix Section 1) that they be given “legal incentives…to cooperate with copyright owners to deter the unauthorized storage and transmission of copyrighted materials or, in the alternative, to take other action to deter the unauthorized storage and transmission of copyright materials.”
Coming to the chapter with fresh eyes allows for an initially easy deception. The language in parts is bland and general, taking cognisance of the IP rules for the “mutual advantage of producers and users” to “facilitate the diffusion of information”. All this, it is suggested, is to aid access to the wonderful world of diversity that is the public domain.
The public domain, however, is evidently seen to be one heavily circumscribed by both the State and its corporate partners.
The treaty entitles signatories to restrict information, for instance, through trial proceedings that would be “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defence or national security”.
Signatory states already have similar domestic restrictions designed to curb such information mechanisms as freedom of information.
Privacy is also shot through, be it in instances when authorities in signatory states can provide names and addresses of importers in violation to owners of that intellectual property.
The entire chain of production and use is targeted, with information including “any person involved in any aspects of the infringement or alleged infringement”. Third persons said to be “involved in the production and distribution of such goods or services and of their channels of distribution” are also netted.
As the text is chewed further, the restrictions, notably in terms of public use, start mounting. In fact, the public seem to be a defanged, inconsequential presence.
Copyright, for instance, is said to be matter for the parties to balance within their domestic regulations, but the agreement does not bind parties to aim for that goal. There is no mandatory fair use model provision to speak of.
As for how long such copyright terms would run, a protection period of 70 years is offered after performance or publication, and if not published within 25 years after creation, for 70 years after that creation. Better, though not by much, than the absurdly lengthy 120 year period initially proposed by the US Trade Representative.
Related: The Pacific Trade Agreement is an Attack on Sovereignty
Excerpt:
In 2004, Mike Nattrass, a leader of Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party, thundered, “The EU was sold to the British people as a trading agreement and turned into a political union which is changing our basic laws and traditions.”
And in 2007, former German President Roman Herzog lamented: “84 percent of the legal acts in Germany stemmed from [EU headquarters in] Brussels.”
He concluded that his country should no longer be considered an independent nation.
In 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former ruler of the USSR, had raised a different type of red flag. While in Britain, he described the EU as “the new European Soviet.”
Few took that revealing remark seriously.
It is now 2015. Led by President Obama, the United States has agreed to link arms in a trade agreement with 11 Pacific Rim nations. Labeled the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the proposal has been promoted as a beneficial trade agreement that will enhance U.S. trade, counter China’s exports, create jobs here at home, protect the environment, enforce human rights, and more.
But a close examination of what is known about this pact (no copies have been made available, other than what has leaked out) reveals that it is far more than a mere trade pact.
Instead, it should be viewed as the beginning of a process similar to the one employed to create the European Union.
Negotiations leading to completion of this pact have been conducted in secrecy, even to the point of refusing to provide members of Congress with copies. Congress is given 90 days to mull over passage or refusal but no amendments are allowed because Congress has already given the president authority to forbid congressional changes.
Not only that, but TPP negotiators want to keep portions of the document secret for at least four years even if Congress okays it. Why any member of Congress would agree to all of this is somewhat mind-boggling.
Mr. Obama won’t admit it, but TPP is designed to be the beginning step in a political and economic union that will result in our doing to ourselves precisely what has been done to 28 nations in Europe.
Members of Congress, both House and Senate, must hear from voters about this.
And this is not just about America - the people of all 12 affected nations need to wake up and prevent the ratification of this monstrous, globalist, NWO machination.
If TPP isn’t rejected, a huge chunk of our collective nations' independence will have been traded away.
If asked, Gorbachev might even refer to a ratified TPP as “the new Pacific Soviet.”
Reduced then, to its barest form, only a few provisions identified by the EFF can be deemed to be less inhibitive than what was found in initial drafts. Extending copyright protections to “buffer” copies in a computer system was eventually dropped by the USTR. The parallel importation of cheaper versions of copyright works will be permitted, complemented by an express authorisation of devices that bypass regions (EFF, Oct 9).
Leaving aside the evident influence of Hollywood in the entire affair, the heft of the pharmaceutical industries was also made apparent. Stifling innovation in its name, the chapter effectively entrenches the most anti-competitive practices of all by enforcing oligopolies with the grace, or gracelessness, of law.
“The TPP,” argues Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program Director, “would cost lives.”
The implications are extensive, but a few points should be noted. Patent Term adjustments (Article QQ.E.14), extensions which delay the entry of generic medicines while also limiting access to cheaper medicines, looms large.
Speed is of the essence, with parties undertaking to “make best efforts to process applications for market approval of pharmaceutical products in an efficient and timely manner, with a view to avoiding unreasonable and unnecessary delays.”
The state parties are given considerable leeway in terms of making “available a period of additional sui generis protection to compensate for unreasonable curtailment of the effective patent term as a result of the marketing approval process.”
Stifling measures regarding the release of generic drugs into the market is provided by QQ.E.15, which enables parties to“adopt or maintain a regulatory review exception for pharmaceutical products”.
In theory, this replicates provision in states where generic drugs are permitted as exceptions which enable them to be made in small quantities before the patent expires. Well and good, but for the fact that any such review must be mindful that the legitimate interests of the patent owner shall not be unreasonably prejudiced.
Related: The TPP Chapter on Drug Patents Will Kill Drug Dependents
Excerpt:
"The passage of the final version of the secretive TPP a few days ago will literally kill any drug dependent today because it would raise up the prices of even the now cheaper generic versions of an antibiotic, or take them out of the market altogether due to intellectual property infringement."
Furthermore, market exclusivity is granted for pharmaceutical products for “at least five years” – a means of ensuring that generic drug registration will be delayed for a designated period of time.
Related: Big Pharma Revealed As Puppetmaster Behind TPP Secrecy
Third parties are not permitted to market the same or similar product using the same or other data regarding the safety and efficacy of that product.
Even if the parties accept applications for generic medicines within those five years, marketing approval can only take place after the five year period has expired.
The insidious linking between the market, marketing approval and the patent, gleams with nefarious consequence before the sickbed of humanity. It will also be distressing to some US Democrats who had hoped to build upon the May 10, 2007 deal made under the Bush administration. The “May 10 Agreement” had taken umbrage with patent term extensions and longer marketing exclusivities.
At this point in time, as the clock ticks over respective domestic enactments by the 12 parliaments and congressional bodies, the political classes within the party states will have to consider whether a corporate dictated subservience, legally sanctioned, is better than such alternatives where the commonwealth can prevail.
Related: Read The TPPA Agreement
http://www.wakeupkiwi.com/news-articles-25.shtml#Vladimir
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