Wikileaks Shows What’s New -- and What’s Old -- About the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement

[Commentary] What have we learned from the Wikileaks reveal of the Trans-Pacific Partnership? For one thing, there hasn't been a lot of change in the sorts of provisions the US is asking these several countries to agree to.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement has language that indicates that even temporary electronic copies -- like the copy you’re making of this post on your computer just by reading it, or the copy your computer makes of an mp3 whenever you play it -- are presumptively illegal. It still contains language that can make it harder for countries to create new types of exceptions and limitations to copyright. It still limits the types of exceptions countries can make for laws enforcing digital rights management (DRM). It still pushes for minimum statutory damages for copyright infringement. And so on and so forth. So on the one hand, people could be forgiven for thinking that the recent leaks don’t tell us anything new about what the US Trade Representative (USTR) is asking for. The positions are largely where they were in 2011, at the time of the last leak of the chapter in Internet protocols (IP). And that’s the very big thing that they do tell us -- the objections and concerns raised then haven’t had an impact on the direction the US is taking with these talks. More than that, it means that so many of the recent major events in copyright law have failed to alter the course of the Administration in its push for increasingly outdated policies. The immense amount of detail lavished on pushing a particular view of copyright law suggests that the agreement is being used to push the same sort of agenda we’ve been seeing over the past decade or more. And in the closed-off world of these trade associations, the debates, discussions and progress made in public amount to little at all.