Won't Somebody Think Of The Cows? New Zealand On The Brink Of Sacrificing Its Digital Future In TPP Negotiations

Even before Wikileaks released the full text of TPP's IP chapter, New Zealand's Creative Freedom Foundation had already been given some hints about what was coming:

Last week the Creative Freedom Foundation participated in a group briefing and Q&A session with David Walker, NZ's Chief Negotiator in the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, and officials Angela Strahl and Yvonne Woutersen. The meeting made it quite clear that, although the details aren't final, we can expect to lose many remix rights and see a greater 'orphaned works' problem here in New Zealand in exchange for more dairy exports to the U.S. Rather than further protecting artists' rights, this move will prop up a fundamentalist approach to copyright that will drain the pool of works currently accessible to artists who wish to freely build upon them. … NZ's Parallel Importing abilities are likely to stay unchanged, as is the ability to set our own limitations and exceptions to our domestic Copyright law. However, it was strongly hinted at that an extension of our Copyright Term is inevitable.

What the country's TPP negotiators are effectively doing here is to surrender key rights that belong to all New Zealanders, for the sake of some minor, and probably temporary, financial gains for a single industry with powerful lobbyists. That's a terrible bargain for the country's future. If these concessions are made, it will not only impoverish artists and the general public, who will suddenly be prevented from using and building on vast swathes of the digital past, it will also make it far harder to set up 21st-century companies that are based on creativity, not cows.

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