They're Baaaack!
I guess we all knew they wouldn't give up on this. If this gets defeated (I really hope it does) expect round 3 to be even more devious and hidden.
Fears about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) have surfaced again, with a pair of open letters calling on negotiators to remove provisions applying to intellectual property. The TPP is a treaty being negotiated among Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the …
"Thankfully, US President Obama recently suggested that the TPP's text will be released to the public in November."
Ah! a pointer to when the various negotiators think that the treaty will be signed. Before November.
Keep everything under wraps until it's too late to do anything about it, then release the treaty to the victims and claim that the negotiations were in good faith and that they are living up to the much vaunted "openness and transparency"
More like smoke and mirrors to me.
Greedy, unethical bastards, but then that's politicians and big business for you.
The average Joe certainly wouldn't understand it, but we don't have to read and understand it. Someone else will, and they'll tell us what it means, and we'll be all up in arms against it based on their interpretation.
The failure of TPTB in this is trying to keep it secret, and therefore being unable to try to spin its terms differently. If they did that, they could claim the interpretations of others are inaccurate and many sheep would believe them. But if the first thing they hear about it is some sort of worst case doomsday interpretation, they'll rise up against it and kill it like they did with SOPA.
I think it is becoming harder and harder to push through these kinds of backdoor deals by treaty, because someone somewhere in the negotiations will leak them, and social media makes it very easy for average people to rise up against something they'd otherwise never hear about. Just tell them it means losing Facebook, Netflix or eBay, and they'll raise hell!
Since 2012 the payment processors have steadily withdrawn from servicing pirate sites, the advertisers have steadily pulled out, Google has been forced to service 6 million DMCA requests a week up from 200K. Every provision of SOPA has been implemented just not via oversights by court orders.