[x-pubpol] Law Professor Questions The Absurd Secrecy Around The TPP Agreement

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120731/04072719891/law-professor-questions-absurd-secrecy-around-tpp-agreement.shtml

By Mike Masnick

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by law professor David
Levine for his radio show/podcast, Hearsay
Culture<http://www.hearsayculture.com/>.
The episode has aired on the radio, and I believe it will go up as a
podcast soon as well. However, he's also written a fantastic article
summarizing
the absurdity of the secrecy around the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP)
Agreement<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/07/trans_pacific_partnership_agreement_tpp_could_radically_alter_intellectual_property_law.single.html>
:

*Imagine being invited to formally offer input on a huge piece of
legislation, a proposed international agreement that could cover everything
from intellectual property rights on the Internet to access to medicine to
investment rights in the agreement’s signatory countries. For 10 minutes,
you’d be able to say whatever you’d like about the proposed law—good, bad,
or indifferent—to everyone involved in the negotiations. But there’s a
caveat: All of your questions, all of your input, on what may be the most
controversial part of the package, would have to be based on a version of
the proposed international agreement that was 16 months old. And in that
16-month period, there were eight rounds of negotiations that could have
changed any and all of the text to which you had access, but no one could
tell you if that version was still accurate.

Would you still take the deal? This is not a hypothetical question; rather,
this is the take-it-or-leave-it offer made to the public in May by the
United States Trade Representative regarding the intellectual property
rights chapter of the massively important but little-known Trans-Pacific
Partnership Agreement (TPP).*

Levine is learning, first-hand, about "transparency" -- USTR style, where
everything is kept secret, but you're cheerful about telling people who
actually would like to help and could provide valuable feedback to come
along... but then they're never allowed to actually see the document in
question.

This is a travesty. It's certainly not democracy. It's a joke carried out
by a government department that appears to be out of control -- focused
mainly on helping a few industry groups with little concern about the
public, despite how widely they'll be impacted by such laws and rules.

-- 
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