Debate: TTIP: What is it and should we be worried?

by Rua Thu Feb 12, 2015 18:27

Ive heard a lot about TTIP from both camps,i don't align myself with the people that think TTIP is a positive thing.It seems all the elite want to do is pass more laws to empower big business at the expense of the workers whose labour they upsurp.Anyway i might just turn up and have a listen might clear up some confusion on the issue.

by T Mon Feb 16, 2015 22:45

The TTP deal is the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement as opposed to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) but they are both simply tools to increase corporate power and undermine democratic power then one can assume that whatever goes into TPP will be put into TTIP too.

And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has just written an article describing some of the horrors that corporate movie industry wants. For example

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) poses massive threats to users in a dizzying number of ways. It will force other TPP signatories to accept the United States' excessive copyright terms of a minimum of life of the author plus 70 years, while locking the US to the same lengths so it will be harder to shorten them in the future. It contains DRM anti-circumvention provisions that will make it a crime to tinker with, hack, re-sell, preserve, and otherwise control any number of digital files and devices that you own. The TPP will encourage ISPs to monitor and police their users, likely leading to more censorship measures such as the blockage and filtering of content online in the name of copyright enforcement. And in the most recent leak of the TPP's Intellectual Property chapter, we found an even more alarming provision on trade secrets that could be used to crackdown on journalists and whistleblowers who report on corporate wrongdoing.

Here, we'd like to explore yet another set of rules in TPP that will chill users' rights. Those are the criminal enforcement provisions, which based upon the latest leak from May 2014 is still a contested and unresolved issue. It's about whether users could be jailed or hit with debilitating fines over allegations of copyright infringement.

Dangerously Low Threshold of Criminality
The US is pushing for a broad definition of a criminal violation of copyright, where even noncommercial activities could get people convicted of a crime. The leak also shows that Canada has opposed this definition. Canada supports language in which criminal remedies would only apply to cases where someone infringed explicitly for commercial purposes.

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Penalties That Must be "Sufficiently High"

The penalties themselves could be enough to intimidate and punish users in a way that is grossly disproportionate to the crime. Based upon the leak, which showed no opposition in key sections, it seems TPP negotiators have already agreed to more vague provisions that would oblige countries to enact prison sentences and monetary fines that are "sufficiently high" to deter people from infringing again. Here is the text: https://www.wikileaks.org/tpp-ip2/#article_h7

Property Seizure and Asset Forfeiture

The TPP's copyright provisions even require countries to enable judges to unilaterally order the seizure, destruction, or forfeiture of anything that can be "traceable to infringing activity", has been used in the "creation of pirated copyright goods", or is "documentary evidence relevant to the alleged offense". Under such obligations, law enforcement could become ever more empowered to seize laptops, servers, or even domain names.

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Domain name seizure in the name of copyright enforcement is not new to us in the US, nor to people running websites from abroad. But these provisions open the door to the passage of ever more oppressive measures to enable governments to get an order from a judge to seize websites and devices. The provision also says that the government can act even without a formal complaint from the copyright holder. So in places where the government chooses to use the force of copyright to censor its critics, this could be even more disastrous.

The last point is key because if this one passed then the next day a new company would be setup that would automatically scan every website on the Internet for infringements, and thereby it would be immediate and devastating

Full text at the link below.