To an uneducated like me. How does one even begin measuring the consequences of any of this?
25 year copyright extension = works withheld from public.
Biologics term = higher cost of life saving drugs = more taxes or less access.
Prevent national boundaries on citizen data = privacy, sovereignty implications.
> Limit governments’ ability to require disclosure of proprietary computer source code and algorithms, to better protect the competitiveness of digital suppliers.
Impacts gov requirements for open-source, e.g. for security and auditing in elections or national security.
Hmmm. Had this been in place earlier, we might have avoided Justin Beiber? I'm sold. Let's do this.
And how is any of this measurable? Like "less" could be a little less or a lot.
Also, I don't see anything lowering art/music/film protection. In fact it seems the opposite, copyrights will last longer, and ISP will police content.
In the end, an agreement of that sort has to be win/win for both countries no? Otherwise why would Canada agree to it?
I guess I only see 3 scenarios for such a trade agreement.
1) Both parties try to predict future economic growth. So maybe US believes IP protection for drugs would have a huge impact on their economy. But Canada thinks they're wrong, and that they'll make more gains from tax free dairy exports to the US that it will trump the loses from drug IPs. This is what I hope is happening. In which case, whoever can predict best wins.
2) This whole thing is driven by corruption. And the deals are not beneficial to Canada at large, but to special interests within it to which the deal is beneficial, even though it won't be for the average tax payer.
3) The US is using military threat or similar kind of forceful threat in order for Canada to just adopt laws that benefit the US only.
Is there something else at play here I can't see?
The way that Trump likes to negotiate that's not necessarily the case. He may think that he can get huge concessions without giving anything in return by just "playing hardball" and issuing threats to terminate negotiations if they don't go his way.
One way to do that is either through common laws which are believed to benefit a sector equally in both countries if enacted across borders, or by trading one sector for another.
If that's not possible, why do we have this deal?