Internal:Public Policy/TPP

Here are some reference points for Wikimedia DC on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

Background: The deal is among 12 national governments and the treaty has 6000 pages. The TPP's text was secret for a long time, and our chapter noted that in conversations with Congressional staff. The secrecy wasn't up to Congress, it was part of the deal-making by national governments and administrations. I'm pretty sure the text is in the open now.

This WMF policy comment on the TPP is clear, and focuses on two big points:

• (1) "TPP would extend copyright terms" to "a minimum of the author’s life plus 70 years." This reduces the materials in the public domain, and so is bad for us. Terms are already that long in Australia, the US, and Chile. But terms are shorter in Japan, New Zealand, and Canada now. The TPP allows national governments to enact exceptions, like the U.S. "fair use" laws, for "education, criticism, news reporting, and accessibility." This is good, but not sufficient. In our Wikimedia work, national exceptions don't generally let us put files from (say) en.wp onto Commons where they would be directly immediately useful across all languages.
• (2) TPP states that countries should not require the hosts of sites like Wikipedia (that is, platforms) to monitor their content for copyright infringement. It "provides for safe harbors from intermediary liability." (This protection is what the phrase "safe harbor" means in this context -- that the platform like Wikipedia is safe.) TPP allows such sites to use and rely on a "notice and takedown system," in which they commit to removing infringing material once they are alerted to a problem. (That part is good.) But the TPP "does not have" (or allow? require?) "a process for counter notices, so that users can push back when a site receives an invalid request to remove content" that somebody says is copyrighted." The TPP "also allows rightsholders to demand identifying information about users" [who have alleged that there is a copyright infringement on the site]. "The vague standards in TPP leave this notice and takedown process open for abuse that can chill speech."

Generally we on Wikimedia DC's public policy committee think:

• Extending terms to the extraordinary length of "author's life plus 70 years" (or longer) is bad policy. That last 50 years isn't a meaningful incentive for authors and creators, and it adds property rights confusion and conflict to materials that are more naturally in the public culture.
• This statement in the WMF policy comment is agreeable: "TPP is a problematic treaty because it harms the public domain and our ability to create and share free knowledge."
• It would be good to understand better the "safe harbor" and "notice and takedown system" implications in the treaty and the WMF commentary about them but quite likely the WMF policy statement gets it right and the TPP is overly friendly to copyright claimants there.