That's all we need: more extreme copyright terms of any sort. ABC/Disney has been using copyright for years to protect the Mouse essentially forever; we don't need more of that. Copyright was never intended by our nation's founders to obstruct future generations from creativity based on our own copyrighted creations, but these traps in the TPP appear to do exactly that.
EFF has put up a letter to the Registrar of Copyrights Maria Pallante urging her to thwart these gratuitous extensions of copyright as part of an otherwise truly unfortunate trade agreement (the text of which is still being kept secret from us). Please sign the letter; your descendants will thank you some day.
Beware
the TPP ©!
the TPP ©!
From what little I've heard about it, the most egregious aspect of the TPP seems to be the inclusion of anti-regulation "takings" reimbursement from government to corporate entities.
ReplyDeleteOr maybe not. As Matt Taibbi mentioned recently:
Delete"...if there's one thing that a generation of free trade agreements has taught us, it's that it's a mistake to read too much into the fine print of any of these deals. With both the WTO and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), there were all sorts of horror stories that were circulated about ordinary Americans ending up surrendering their sovereignty to corporate-friendly secret tribunals in Switzerland and other cabals... That hasn't exactly happened."
(http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-democratic-party-would-triangulate-its-own-mother-20150514)
Of course we don't hear about everything and you'd expect that "takings" provisions would show up mainly as a chilling effect rather than actual suit.. but one does wonder if somebody might be doing some subtle marketing. It doesn't seem impossible that something like corporate sovereignty provisions might be leaked as a distraction from the intellectual property stuff they're really pushing for.