Keeping the Trans-Pacific Partnership from changing our copyright laws | Hacker News Reader

Keeping the Trans-Pacific Partnership from changing our copyright laws

ourfairdeal.org

27 pointsTheLegace4 comments

"TPP organizers are going to incredible lengths to lock citizens out of these negotiations—when talks recently took place in Vancouver, Canada’s trade ministry instituted what amounted to a media blackout, even refusing to tell journalists in which part of town the talks were taking place. TPP documents are top secret—unless you’re one of just 600 big industry lobbyists invited to take part."

[1] http://www.straight.com/news/402631/big-medias-push-extreme-...

Apparently even government MPs (Canada) do not have access to the documents, but 600 lobbyists do. Wow can it be any more underhanded.

A trade agreement negotiation is adversarial. Each country is trying to get terms favorable to its citizens, and doing that will usually require concessions to the other parties.

A country that works out its plans for the negotiation publicly is going to be giving those adversaries a lot information that will result in the country getting a less favorable deal.

International agreements of this sort are usually nothing but attempts, masqueraded in positive-sounding language, to erode foreign sovereignty for (fun and?) profit. Some would say, this is exactly what EU was.

For example, the TPP could stop future governments from making their own decisions on important issues including how long copyright lasts and how Internet service providers do business.

This is important: Congress must obey treaties. This is one of the discredited tacticts of lobbyists: slip small changes for special interest XYZ into a treaty. This makes a mess of the legislative process to amend, repeal, and alter shady business practices. Clinton got suckered into agreeing to put parts of the Glass-stegall repeal into the WTO, and its one of the reasons why we are stuck with a f/cked up financial system. Congress (not a partisan issue) may be now boxed in (not be able to unilaterally regulate the issue). In essence, this is a special interest attack vector that can do lasting damage. Its worth paying attention to similar mechanics when you see them arise.

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