How the TPP Will Affect You and Your Digital Rights

The Internet is a diverse ecosystem of private and public stakeholders. By excluding a large sector of communities—like security researchers, artists, libraries, and user rights groups—trade negotiators skewed the priorities of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) towards major tech companies and copyright industries that have a strong interest in maintaining and expanding their monopolies of digital services and content. Negotiated in secret for several years with overwhelming influence from powerful multinational corporate interests, it's no wonder that its provisions do little to nothing to protect our rights online or our autonomy over our own devices. For example, everything in the TPP that increases corporate rights and interests is binding, whereas every provision that is meant to protect the public interest is non-binding and is susceptible to get bulldozed by efforts to protect corporations.

Below is a list of communities who were excluded from the TPP deliberation process, and some of the main ways that the TPP's copyright and digital policy provisions will negatively impact them. Almost all of these threats already exist in the United States and in many cases have already impacted users there, because the TPP reflects the worst aspects of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The TPP threatens to lock down those policies so these harmful consequences will be more difficult to remedy in future copyright reform efforts in the U.S. and the other eleven TPP countries. The impacts could also be more severe in those other countries because most of them lack the protections of U.S. law such as the First Amendment and the doctrine of fair use.

General Audience

• Excessive copyright terms deprive the public domain of decades of creative works. They also worsen the orphan works problem, which arises when obtaining permission to use works is impossible because the rightsholder is unknown, deceased, or is nowhere to be found, and using them without permission is legally risky.
• Lose autonomy and control over legally purchased devices and content because it is a crime to remove its digital locks or Digital Rights Management (DRM). This means modifying, repairing, recycling, or otherwise tinkering with a digital device or its contents could be banned or is at least legally risky.
• If you post a personal video that contains someone's copyrighted song, video, or image online without permission, it may get taken down or the user may be forced to pay a penalty no matter how insignificant that copyrighted content is to the whole of the video. Their account may also be suspended or restricted permanently or for a prolonged amount of time. If it happens to go viral they may be held criminally liable because it's arguably available at a "commercial scale."
• Those who put on a themed party or cosplay based on a character from a favorite show or movie could be forced to pay a penalty or have images from it removed from the Internet. Again, the risks and penalties are much higher if it happens on a “commercial scale.”
• If you stream some copyrighted gameplay with commentary to friends and other fans, the video may get taken down or the user may be forced to pay a fee.
• It will hamper introduction of new user protections in the law, such as new fair use rules or new permanent permissions to circumvention DRM on devices, because several thousands of companies would be empowered to challenge new public interest rules as undermining their "investments" or expected future profits.
• New rules applicable to national-level domains will block reforms that EFF and others are working on to protect website owners from having to reveal their real name, address, and other personally identifying information through the domain name system (DNS), making them vulnerable to copyright and trademark trolls, identity thieves, scammers, and harassers.
• Safety of devices and networks could be compromised because the TPP bans countries from requiring source-code disclosure and code auditing for most software and devices.

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Innovators and Business Owners

• DRM is often used for anti-competitive purposes. It can block innovators from building interoperable services or products to be used with existing platforms, and prevents third-party repair services. More fundamentally, it blocks tinkering and experimentation which is critical to open innovation.
• Small web-based businesses and platforms may not have the legal resources or expertise to deal with excessive or faulty copyright takedowns.
• Services that may want to use or build upon existing content for new purposes will have less protections in other countries because fair use is not enshrined in the TPP. No incentive is created for TPP countries to pass flexible e