Notes from meeting with USTR on the TPP IPR chapter

KEI Director James Love has posted notes from a meeting with USTR officials on the Trans Pacific Partnership, the first FTA negotiated by the Obama administration.  The notes were originally posted to the A2K email list, moderated by Knowledge Ecology International.]  A link and excerpt:

http://lists.keionline.org/pipermail/a2k_lists.keionline.org/2010-December/000327.html

Today USTR provided some additional insight into negotiations of a
regional, Asia-Pacific trade agreement, known as the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) Agreement. The USTR web page on the TPP negotiations
is http://www.ustry.gov/tpp [1]. At present, the TPP negotiators
include Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, New Zealand, Peru,
Singapore and Vietnam. Japan and Canada have expressed interest in
joining the negotiations, and USTR clearly would like to design an
agreement that will be open to other countries. Our discussions
focused on the intellectual property chapter in the agreement.
According to USTR, the only text that has been tabled for the IP
chapter concerns trademarks and general provisions -- the patents,
copyrights, test data and enforcement sections of the IP chapter are
being designed now. USTR expects a number of health related issues to
be raised in the upcoming Santiago Chile meeting in February 2011.

USTR said the IP chapter for the TPP would harmonize IPR obligations
strictly upwards. ...