Public Citizen has released initial analysis, <a href="http://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-ecommerce-chapter-analysis.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.citizen.org/documents/tpp-ecommerce-chapter-analy...</a>, <i>"The E-commerce chapter … addresses a range of issues including duties on digital products, paperless trade administration, and rules on electronic signatures, net neutrality and data protection. The text also includes provisions limiting the ability of countries to keep data within their territorial borders.<p>… any legal system that imposes limits on private sector data transfers to jurisdictions for the purpose of safeguarding citizens’ data against foreign government intelligence agencies, as was recently accomplished by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Schrems v Facebook Inc, 2015 Case C-362/14, could contribute to violation of Section A of the TPP’s Investment chapter and be subject to sanction and heavy penalties through the investor-state dispute mechanism.<p>… Article 14.17 prevents governments from requiring the disclosure of source code as a condition of import, distribution, sale or use of software or of products containing software … while the Article excludes disclosure obligations in commercially negotiated contracts, it does not exempt source code disclosure provisions imposed by means of a software license.<p>… As open source licenses are not ‘commercially negotiated’ but rather imposed on others, there is concern that any attempt to enforce such licenses against third parties by means of the courts would amount to a violation of this Article, opening the country whose court system carried out such enforcement to heavy-handed penalties through the investor-state dispute enforcement mechanisms.<p>… addressing cybersecurity breaches can require mandating the publication of source code so as to facilitate fixing of security flaws. The TPP’s prohibition on such requirements could undermine security measures of this type."</i><p>ISDS primers: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=M4-mlGRPmkU</a> & <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=AABOIcXZZwg" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=AABOIcXZZwg</a> & <a href="http://isdscorporateattacks.org" rel="nofollow">http://isdscorporateattacks.org</a>
xpost from the other thread because I'd welcome any insight on this:<p>What confuses the hell out of me regarding the TPP - and maybe it's just because I'm in the HN/Reddit echo chamber on this - but if the TPP is so damn important to reigning in China in the 21st century or whatever, then why did they load it up with a bunch of unrelated antagonizing bullshit?<p>It doesn't seem to me that the intellectual property provisions of the agreement are all that important to the overall stated goals of the TPP. Yet they are so fucking regressive and antagonistic that there is some chance (I guess? Again, echo chamber...) that they will sabotage the rest of the agreement. After SOPA, etc., if it were me and I wanted to be sure that the TPP passed in enough Pacific Rim countries to make it effective, I would keep anything remotely like SOPA as far away from my precious treaty as I possibly could.<p>Instead, the IP portions of the agreement are basically the language that was in SOPA all over again, which pissed a whole lot of people off last time. It's really hard to take seriously the claim that the TPP is so important, when the people drafting it are including language that is pretty much guaranteed to stoke vigorous opposition, for reasons that are mostly orthogonal to their goals.
This really doesn't seem that bad. It's mainly restricting what governments can do to restrict their people. In other words - keeping trade free. Isn't that kind of a good thing?<p>- Governments are not allowed to restrict where companies store user data.<p>- Governments can choose how to deal with spam, they don't have to adopt the US's CAN-SPAM law.<p>- Governments can't force companies to disclose their source code.<p>- Copyright term hasn't been extended to life + 120 years as earlier feared. Only to life+70 years which it already was in the USA anyway.<p>- Governments don't have to impose net neutrality. That's an issue in the US, but not everywhere else. And they still can if their people want. Such restrictions could easily backfire, especially when they have exemptions for a few hand-picked uses like VOIP and telemedicine. So what if somebody invents a new technology that also needs preferential treatment for latency or bandwidth?<p>- Governments aren't allowed to impose security restrictions on users as a tool to impede free trade. Does anyone really want the government to dictate how they do internet security? Or for foreign companies to be blocked in favor of domestic competitors?
I don't worry about stuff like this too much, or stuff about the UK wanting to do stupid stuff like ban all encryption. I believe the internet is going to become more private and more anonymous as time goes on. Eventually everyone will be using the equivalent of VPNs on machines/browsers that don't give out any identifying information unless a user extremely explicitly tells it to. Or perhaps something similar to Freenet will become much more popular. We're already seeing hardware (like the iPhone) coming encrypted from the manufacturer with seemingly no way for any government agency to decrypt it forcefully. Ad blockers and tracking blockers are more popular than ever. Firefox just today released an update to help prevent trackers.<p>It's just a matter of time - ISPs and governments and corporations will lose the ability to track their users outside of their specific platform, and many of the platforms we use today will be replaced with P2P alternatives that make tracking impossible and aren't "owned" by anyone. I am sure the governments of the world will be livid.
Does anyone believe this will not become the law?<p>You can peaceably gather in protest and maybe get a few sniping remarks on the nightly news, you can call, write, knock on your representatives door, you can donate money and time, but none of it will stop this treaty from being passed because those in power wrote it for themselves and will pass it for themselves.<p>If anything were to stop it it would be the wide disregard and disobedience of the illegitimate laws it supposedly creates.