New WikiLeaks of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement Intellectual Property Chapter -- Analysis of Copyright Provisions

The United States is currently negotiating a large, regional free trade agreement with eleven other countries: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. On October 16, 2014, WikiLeaks published a new leak of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement’s (TPP) negotiating text for the intellectual property chapter. This text, dated May 14, 2014, contains some substantial changes from last year’s November leak of the text (which revealed the state of negotiations as of August 2013).

The chapter is now shorter and numerous brackets (brackets denote areas of the text which have not yet been agreed to) have been removed. The text also includes some new provisions. Some differences between the copyright provisions from last year’s leak to today’s leak are highlighted below. However, given that the leaked text is from May, further changes may have been made in the last five months and bracketed issues may have been resolved. TPP negotiations will continue in Australia next week where issues may reach further resolution.

Copyright Term

In the prior leak, New Zealand, Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada and Japan supported a proposal allowing the copyright term of protection to be determined by “each Party’s domestic law and the international agreements to which each Party is a party.” The current leak reveals that this proposal has been eliminated.

The new text suggests that the copyright term will be specified in the TPP, though the exact number of years has not yet been agreed to. Bracketed language around the period of years reveals that the three options being discussed are life of the author plus fifty, seventy or one-hundred years. The United States, along with the countries with which the United States already has bilateral trade agreements with—Australia, Chile, Peru and Singapore—currently have a period of protection of life plus seventy years. Mexico is the only country that provides for life of the author plus one hundred years. The other countries in the agreement use the international standard of life plus fifty years.

For corporate works that have been published, the bracketed text includes periods of protection of fifty, seventy, seventy-five or ninety-five years.

In addition to these specified periods of years, a new proposal similar to the Berne rule of shorter term appears in the leaked text. This rule would essentially allow parties to limit the term of protection provided to authors of another party to the term provided under that party’s legislation. For example, if the final TPP text required a period of copyright protection of life plus fifty years, the United States would not be required to provide its period of life plus seventy years to authors in New Zealand if New Zealand continued to provide a term of life plus fifty years. The United States currently does not implement the Berne rule of shorter term.

Formalities

Another new provision in the text is a rule against formalities. Article QQ.G.X is unbracketed and therefore appears to be agreed to by the TPP negotiating parties. It reads, “No Party may subject the enjoyment and exercise of the rights of authors, performers and producers of phonograms provided for in this Chapter to any formality.”

This language could be problematic if the United States, or other TPP parties, wanted to re-introduce formalities for copyright protections granted that go beyond minimum international standards. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante, for example, proposed the re-introduction of formalities for the last twenty years of copyright protection in the United States. If adopted, such a proposal would violate the TPP and subject the United States to investor-state dispute settlement, under which a corporation could sue the Unites States government for failure to comply with the TPP.

Limitations and Exceptions

Parties to the TPP have agreed to include language on limitations and exceptions, including a provision that has not been included in prior U.S. free trade agreements. This language reads:

Each Party shall endeavor to achieve an appropriate balance in its copyright and related rights system, inter alia by means of limitations or exceptions that are consistent with Article QQ.G.16.1, including those for the digital environment, giving due consideration to legitimate purposes such as, but not limited to: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research, and other similar purposes; and