How Perl and R Reveal the United States' Isolation In the TPP Negotiations

langelgjm writes "As /. reported, last Thursday Wikileaks released a draft text of the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Since then, many commentators have raised alarm about its contents. But what happens when you mix the leaked text together with Perl regular expressions and R's network analysis packages? You get some neat visualizations showing just how isolated the United States is in pushing for extreme copyright and patent laws."

Comments

In summary, what can we conclude from these data?

[DrPBacon]

"In summary, what can we conclude from these data? Canada, with by far the most sole-country proposals, seems like it is up to something." Those shifty Canadians. I knew it.

Perl? Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the original article with a little more technical detail. To those interested (like me) what was Perl doing there, it was just a single line script with regex. The rest is R.

Re:What a poor commentary

[Sockatume]

Yes, this one-page article clearly represents the entirety of his knowledge on the subject, he's obviously not a political science professor or anything.

Re:Go Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

I would personally say it is because the USA has bet the farm on being the monopoly holder on intellectual properties. Look where Hollyweird is, where silicon valley is, etc. A goodly portion of the US's GDP is based on intellectual properties, and ventures related to or hinging upon, intellectual properties or intellectual property laws. (Hollywood, music, software, biomedical, pharmecutical, biotech, etc.)

Compare that with the economies of the other countries implicated, who have GDPs predominantly composed of the trade and sale of material goods.

Given its market position, NATURALLY, the USA would only sign on to an agreement like this, if it could leverage market dominance in that market niche.

How unsurprising

[vikingpower]

The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of rrelevance. Has already been going on for a couple of years: computer technology, aerospace tech, politics. NSA scandal accelerated it. The sun is going down over US America.

Re:How unsurprising

[dkleinsc]

The US is being gently pushed ( nudged ) into a beginning of irrelevance

I'd consider it more the US government trying to do whatever it can for the 0.1% of the country that pays for the majority of political campaigning, and screw the other 99.9% of us. And whether the US government becomes irrelevant or not, as long as the corporate overlords are happy, the politicians will be kept comfortable.

In the words of Number Two: "But you, like an idiot, want to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore! It's only corporations!"

Re:How unsurprising

[Sabriel]

It might not stay gentle. Do you remember the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire?

Oh, wait, yeah, that was a while back. Here, some reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire

Hmm, that's a tad indigestible, I need a car analogy. No, a gorilla analogy!

Imagine a tribe of gorillas. Let's call the biggest, strongest, most heavily-armed gorilla "Sam". Luckily enough for the tribe, Sam was actually a fairly nice guy - so long as you purchased his stuff or at least used his bananas to purchase stuff, and didn't draw attention to his tendencies to vanity and his insistence on being in charge - and it really helped that he kept the more aggressive males in check (every so often one'd get nasty where Sam could see it, or even challenge him, and everybody else'd get a reminder of why nobody fought Sam).

When the second-biggest gorilla, a tyrant and almost as big as Sam, collapsed from steroid abuse, things were really starting to look up.

But as time passed, the other gorillas noticed Sam was changing. Now some folk go doddery and forgetful, but Sam, he kept poking through the tribe's stuff, peeking in on them all the time. It was like he'd spent so long keeping a lookout for what his old nemesis did, he couldn't stop doing it. And he started to care less and less about whether the other gorillas complained when he rode roughshod over someone. He even started hassling his own young, creating lots of rules about where they could go, what they could take with them, what they should report back to him, and his punishments got harder too.

Trouble is, it's not just Sam's young and his friends in the tribe that have noticed. Some of those aggressive gorillas, both the older ones who kept their heads down while Sam was in his prime and the younger ones who don't remember how bad it was before Sam became the tribe's silverback, they've noticed too. They've noticed the changes, and they've noticed he's having trouble holding his bananas.

Can you guess what they'll try to do if, some day, Sam can't hold his bananas anymore?

'Free Trade Agreement'

[king neckbeard]

Can we drop the nonsense that TPP is a 'free trade agreement?' A free trade agreement would be very simple. Don't bomb us or torture our citizens, and you can trade freely with us. TPP undermines free trade by forcing countries into even further support of anti-capitalism legal monopolies as a condition for not restricting trade.

Thanks

[langelgjm]

Author of the article here. You're right, I meant it to be a little funny. As I noted to the GP, most people studying these issues already know where the countries line up. Canada has a history of being different on IP issues than the US (much to the US's chagrin - it's why we put them on the Special 301 "priority watch list" in 2012).

Here's a link

[langelgjm]

Here's a link with more technical detail. I had to tone down the technical aspects for the Washington Post.

That link does not have full code, but if you want, I can e-mail it to you (I already have for two other people). I didn't post the code online because I wanted to keep track of who was asking for it. But I'm happy to share it.