Trans-Pacific Partnership Would Harm User Rights and the Commons

The final text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) wasreleasedearlier this month. The gigantic agreement contains sweeping provisions regarding environmental regulation, pharmaceutical procurement, intellectual property, labor standards, food safety, and many other things. If adopted, it would be the most significant expansion of international restrictions on copyright in over two decades. Over the last five years, the TPP has been developed and negotiated in secret. With the text now locked down, participating governments will decide whether to ratify it.

The TPP is a direct threat to the public interest and the commons. It downplays the importance of the public domain and exceptions and limitations, increases the term of copyright protection, and demands harsh infringement penalties.

The TPP must be rejected.

In our initialanalysis，我们研究了几个在数字时代会对公共领域、创造力和共享以及用户权利有害的问题。

• 20-year copyright term extension is unnecessary and unwarranted:该协议要求各成员国将著作权保护期限延长到作者的寿命再加上70年。12个参与国中的6个必须将它们的版权期限延长至现有国际条约要求的基准以上20年。

• The mention of the public domain is lip service, at best: Text has been removed which more actively supported the public domain as a key policy objective.

• Enforcement provisions are mandatory, while exceptions and limitations are optional: Instead of securing mandatory limitations and exceptions for uses of copyrighted works under TPP, all of the provisions that recognize the rights of the public are voluntary, whereas almost everything that benefits rightsholders is binding.

• Potentially drastic infringement penalties, even for non-commercial sharing: The agreement allows for infringement penalties that are disproportionate to harm, providing for the possibility of imprisonment and excessive monetary fines for lesser infringements.

• Criminal penalties for circumventing digital rights management on works: The agreement adopts a mechanism that would prohibit the circumvention of technological protection measures (DRM) on works, and treats this type of violation as a separate offense regardless of any copyright infringing activity on the underlying content.

• Investor-state dispute settlement mechanism may be leveraged for intellectual property claims: Copyrighted materials can be subject to the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism, meaning that a private company could bring a lawsuit against a TPP country if that country adopts a law that the company claims would harm its right to exploit its copyright interest.

Statement from Creative Commons on copyright-related aspects of the TPP