By Li Hongmei
Highly secretive trade agreements have been published on the WikiLeaks website with 95 pages that were taken from the recent TPP or better known as Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.
The main aim of the TPP is to unite nations such as the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei, which when all combined, make up about 40% of the world's gross domestic product.
Barack Obama and other leaders of the outstanding 11 states were keeping the TPP in secrecy for a lot of years.
According to the officials, the agreement would stir up the economies of those countries listed in it. During the Barack Obama's speech back in 2011 he mentioned "The TPP will boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports and creating more jobs for our people, which is my number-one priority. It has the potential to be a model not only for the Asia Pacific but for future trade agreements".
The opponents of the agreement claim that among economic changes document contains many other hidden motives that will not help other countries.
For instance, WikiLeaks has published a chapter from an August draft that talks about Intellectual Property, or IP. California-based Electronic Frontier Foundation warns that the earlier leaked text shows evidently that the agreement "would have extensive negative ramifications for users' freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process and hinder peoples' abilities to innovate." The text published by WikiLeaks proves the point.
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower site was extremely hard and critical of the TPP.
"If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs," Assange stated.
James Love from Knowledge Ecology International shared his opinion on that as well, "The TPP text shrinks the space for exceptions in all types of intellectual property rights. Negotiated in secret, the proposed text is bad for access to knowledge, bad for access to medicine and profoundly bad for innovation."
Critics of the agreement already stated that the new material could result in medical services going up. The chapter published on the whistleblowers web site confirms that fears stating that drug companies could easily extend their patents under the TPP, thus prohibiting other countries from producing certain pills or selling them to others.
However, the current innovations will not affect only medicine but other sides of everyday lives as well. Dr. Matthew Rimmer, an expert in intellectual property law, told in his interview to the Sydney Morning Herald.
"One could see the TPP as a Christmas wish-list for major corporations, and the copyright parts of the text support such a view. Hollywood, the music industry, big IT companies such as Microsoft and the pharmaceutical sector would all be very happy with this."
WikiLeaks states that the Obama administration and other leaders of states who are part of the TPP agreement are eager to ratify the agreement before the next year. With the draft document already published it could all be put at stake now.
