Is this about "free trade" or about profit-maximizing and guaranteeing for some big corporations?
Very dangerous, and sounds more like "Empire – Colonies" than "Equal partners in trade"
Unbelievable, that the EU does really accept all this! Only explanation: Those politicians are already bought.
> The TPP means that America will write the rules of the road in the 21st century.
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/11/05/trade-tpp-idINKCN0S...
It very much sounds like they’re treating the rest of the world as colonies.
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.
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.
Either they know, that the other countries will follow anyway (because the politicians are (select one or multiple): incompetent, bought, blackmailed, Pro-US, incompetent, ignoring their own countries interests) -- or the things told about the importance of the treaties are not true, but it is just a vehicle to transport the antagonizing bullshit, because some big corporations want this to be installed.
In the EU (TTIP), my impression is, that at least at the high levels of politicians, the list above just must be applied. Many leading politicians are just hitting so hard to get this installed, that it seems they are mad, when I see what negatives they are ready to swallow. They let the US dictate the treaty and just don't seem to recognize, how the EU is hornswoggled.
What happens to colonies can be seen in the plenty of former colonies that still struggle to get out of poverty.
If the West is moving towards an information economy and is going to let the developing world take over manufacturing, the West wants to protect the information economy. The idea is we want to sell information for goods/services.
This is not about protecting own inventions, but about land-grabbing things that we did not invent, but nature!
The same thing, corporations try again and again. For example, once they copied cures of traditional Indian medicine, patented them in the USA and tried to forbid the free usage.
When this goes on this way, we all will soon have to pay a life-tax for having some type of DNA or bacteria in our bodies. Already, many cures are not invented, because to many patents on life building blocks make the creation to financially risky.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/feb/22/india-protect-t...
"In the first step by a developing country to stop multinational companies patenting traditional remedies from local plants and animals, the Indian government has effectively licensed 200,000 local treatments as "public property" free for anyone to use but no one to sell as a "brand"."