Our Worst Fears are Confirmed. The Trans-Pacific Partnership and Intellectual Property

Monday, October 12, 2015
By Paul Martin

By Binoy Kampmark
Global Research
October 12, 2015

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

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. 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.

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.[1]

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.”[2]

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.

The Rest…HERE

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