Copyright and Secrecy Don’t Make for Good Trade Agreements

 Posted by on May 10, 2013  No Responses »
May 102013
 

Rashmi Rangnath[Public Knowledge (Link)(CC-BY-SA]  Today we filed comments about the proposed United States-European Union Free Trade Agreement – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). We told the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) that copyright is an uncomfortable fit for a trade agreement and should be kept out of the TTIP.

If the USTR still wants to include copyright within the TTIP, it should make sure that a copyright chapter in the TTIP will not impede Congress’s ability to change U.S. copyright laws.

We also asked the USTR to break from the past and not negotiate the TTIP in secret. Continue reading »

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Intellectual Property in the TPP: How About a Little Balance?

 Posted by on August 24, 2012  No Responses »
Aug 242012
 

This blog post was co-written by Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program Director. It was originally published on the Public Knowledge site.

This past Friday (August 17), Douglas E. Schoen published an op-ed in Politico lobbying for “strong” intellectual property (IP) protection in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The op-ed argued that such an approach would be a “straightforward” route to “job-creating innovation.” The op-ed ignored serious costs that over aggressive IP protection can pose to the economy, including the stifling of innovation in consumer electronics products and high monopolist prices for consumer goods including critical medicines. Like others before and since, the study Schoen cites does not support inferences linking particular IP demands in the TPP to innovation or jobs. Continue reading »

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Shhhh. The TPP Is Secret.

 Posted by on March 2, 2012  No Responses »
Mar 022012
 

[Originally posted on publicknowledge.org] In my previous post on the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), I explained how provisions of TPP might harm you. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what might be bad within secret agreements like the TPP–all we have to go off of is leaked text that is many months old. But this raises another point: the secrecy itself is bad, not just because it makes it hard to comment on what may or may not be in the text, but because it undermines the democratic process. Secrecy might make sense for nuclear disarmament talks but it’s hard to see why agreements like the TPP–which amount to international treaties that set levels of intellectual property protection around the world–deserve such hush-hush treatment. Continue reading »

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