The Most Important Trade Agreement That We Know Nothing About

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). Unfortunately, this modest but sad excuse for public participation was the best offer to ask questions and offer input to TPP negotiators since the public phase of the negotiations began more than two years ago. So civil society groups, academics, experts (“nerds”), and regular Joe concerned citizens said yes.

Read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/07/trans_pacific_partnership_agreement_tpp_could_radically_alter_intellectual_property_law.single.html