The leaked text from the Trans Pacific Partnership Intellectual Property Chapter confirms fears that the agreement would reduce New Zealanders' access to information and restrict our ability to innovate, both on and offline, if a number of the draft copyright provisions were agreed.
If the provisions, as proposed by the United States, are accepted, then New Zealanders would be severely limiting opportunities to innovate, remix, create and distribute content. Internet users and businesses will face higher copyright costs and reduced access to content. In short, we would be trading away our country's digital future, and locking in agricultural exports as the only source of trade growth.
Any copyright provisions agreed to in the TPP must safeguard our ability to develop flexible digital policy in our own national interests. It is not for foreign corporations to write domestic law for New Zealand, but that is how these copyright proposals have come about.
Global trade agreements should be encouraging countries to promote a rich public domain, not require them to shrink it. History has shown that innovation blossoms from the sharing of works. Not fencing them in. The proposed provisions in the TPP would require longer copyright terms for works. There are hundreds of millions of works, of many kinds, protected under copyright. Only a small percentage of these have long-term commercial value. Copyright terms that are too long can discourage access to information and innovation and inadvertently prevent the rediscovery of out-of-print or unused works.
Trading copyright works throughout the world can be impeded by parallel importation restrictions.
