The TPP is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and it began in 2005, it was a very small
agreement between a bunch of countries like New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore and it was
really very modest they just wanted to increase the trade amongst those countries.
And then in 2010 the US sort of invited itself saying you've got a rather nice little treaty
there why don't you let us join in?
And since that time TPP has been growing and growing in importance until now it is trying
effectively to define what trade will be like for the next kind of 20, or 30 years.
So it's a massively important global treaty that's trying to set the terms for not just
trade but also a lot of other legal aspects of life in the future years.
Wikileaks actually managed to get hold of probably the most important because it's the
most contentious chapter.
It's dealing with what's called IP so it's things like copyright and patents and one
reason why that's so important is because it has massive effects on the internet so
everyone, like everyone watching this for example will be effected by these rules because
it's trying to set the rules for how people use the internet.
So I'll just run through some of things it's doing.
It's very broad, it covers as I say patents and copyright so for example for patents it's
nearly all the Americans who are driving this.
As you say it's hard to read partly because there are some things that the Americans want,
there are some things the Australians want so it's a kind of mish mash but basically
people are going to be talking about what the Americans want because they are the ones
driving this and basically everyone else is fighting them.
For example for patents, they want to be able to patent animals.
They think that would be a really good idea.
Another good idea they think is that you could patent surgical methods so where as we tend
to think of health as being something you just try and help by letting doctors do what
they can, they actually want to patent it so you'll get people who will be forbidden
from doing operations because it might infringe on someone's patent.
That's another really interesting idea.
So the patent side is that kind of thing, it's just making the system worse but it's
trying to make patents even stronger to get more money out of people but let's concentrate
on copyright because that's really what's going to effect the internet and therefore
your viewers mostly.
Its got a lot of things like extending the term of copyright so copyright typically lasts
for 70 years after the death of the person whose created something.
Interestingly when copyright was invented in 1710, it was only 14 years so you can already
see that its extended massively.
Some countries like Mexico want to now make it 100 years after the death of the creator.
So they want to extend copyright.
They also want to bring in the idea that even temporary copies are covered by copyright
and you could say well why do I care about that?
Well, everything is actually a copy.
Everything on your computer when you download stuff, when you watch this program is a copy.
And they want to bring in copyright for that so you would have to get permission just to
download anything across the internet or even have it on your computer.
So they're trying to broaden the range of copyright.
They're also trying to make DRM, the idea of locking down copyright materials even more
stringent so that you can't actually break the copyright on things like DVDs or in anything
else.
Bring in more stringent laws against that.
They want to bring in very harsh civil damages so if you're found to have infringed on copyright
they want to bring in laws that would effectively let you be sued for practically everything
like they're claiming things like the effective loss of revenue, the lost profits, the damages,
they just pile it on so to try and make it as expensive as possible.
Worse than that are the criminal damages, just to distinguish between the two.
Civil damages are when you get sued for money.
Criminal damages are when they send you to prison.
What they want to do is to extend copyright infringement, so if you make illegal copies
from being just civil to a criminal offence.
So if you actually made a copy of something on the right scale they would then send you
to prison, it wouldn't just be a matter of paying a fine.