Trans-Pacific Partnership May Endanger World Health, Newly Leaked Chapter Shows

blottsie writes WikiLeaks has released an updated version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) chapter on intellectual property. The new version of the texts, dated May 2014, show that little improvement has been made to sections critics say would hurt free speech online. Further, some of the TPP's stipulations could have dire consequences for healthcare in developing nations. The Daily Dot reports: "Nearly all of the changes proposed by the U.S. advantage corporate entities by expanding monopolies on knowledge goods, such as drug patents, and impose restrictive copyright policies worldwide. If it came into force, TPP would even allow pharmaceutical companies to sue the U.S. whenever changes to regulatory standards or judicial decisions affected their profits. Professor Brook K. Baker of Northeastern U. School of Law [said] that the latest version of the TPP will do nothing less than lengthen, broaden, and strengthen patent monopolies on vital medications."

Comments

freedoms f----d

[harvey the nerd]

"Whenever changes to regulatory standards... affected their profits?"
So if a country deregulates absurd and life threatening over-regulations, Merck, Pfizer, GSK etc sue the country/taxpayers ?
Maybe Putin will do us a favor and launch the nukes.

Re:freedoms f----d

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Putin will do us a favor and launch the nukes.

Or maybe we'll all win the lottery.

Nothing will change until we make it change.

The first thing to do is to follow the money trail and identify:

1. The companies who've paid the politicians
2. The names of the people in the company who've made the decisions
3. The names of politicians who've taken the money

How do we get that effort started? What will it take, who can do it?

Re:freedoms f----d

[Anonymous Coward]

State-guaranteed monopolies don't encourage innovation, they encourage rent-seeking.

Re:freedoms f----d

[s.petry]

Nearly all governments, and most people, believe that patents encourage innovation by ensuring that innovators can profit from their investment of time and resources

Given your blanket generalization I'll retort "No, they don't". Numerous countries have been force into following the American model to compete (Europe), but that is not the same thing as "agreeing" as you so bluntly claimed. China has ignored US patents and Copyrights for decades, with no detriment to their trade. In fact the trade deficit between the US and China has consistently grown.

The US strong arming someone into enforcing US Patent laws is not the same thing as a country agreeing with the Laws. Perhaps you should consider why numerous countries are very hostile toward US companies, especially in the Medical and Agricultural sectors.

Re:freedoms f----d

[harvey the nerd]

My wife takes a pill in asia that is superior to anything in the US, $4 per day. This chemo pill is illegal in the US - its too nice and not 100% toxics (only ~30%). Literally there's a law about it, and I've been yelled at by the FDA about it. The closest, INFERIOR pill in the US has been running $9000 per month has more side effects and shorter life. If the US changes the "anti-nice" rule and legalizes this old generic drug, should US taxpayers owe PFE etc a billion $ per year? It is that simple.

Re:freedoms f----d

[ShanghaiBill]

State-guaranteed monopolies don't encourage innovation, they encourage rent-seeking.

Those are not mutually exclusive. If innovation enables you to extract rents, then of course that will encourage innovation.

Re:freedoms f----d

[Immerman]

And do you really believe a pharmaceutical company would invest years of lab time and millions of dollars developing a cure for X if the guys down the street would be allowed to immediately copy it and sell it at production cost + 1%? There's no way they would ever be able to recoup the development costs, so they wouldn't bother. Drug research funding would be restricted only to academia, government, and philanthropists. Granted, there's much to be said for such a system, there's some serious perverse incentives in the current arrangement - but there's also nothing stopping those other research avenues now, and yet they remain woefully neglected in comparison.

Now I'm definitely not saying our patent system doesn't have serious issues, but there's something to be said for giving inventors a chance to recoup their initial investment. Myself, I like the idea of simply going back to requiring the president to individually sign every approved patent - we'd almost instantly drop the rate of patent approvals to only a few per day, and the thousands of others that didn't make the cut would just have to be discarded. Are there really thousands of inventions per day that enrich humanity enough to justify granting a 20-year monopoly to recoup the development costs? I doubt it. I'd be surprised if there were five.

Re:freedoms f----d

[fustakrakich]

You're givin' us trickle-down there. Don't care for that crap.

You know, the entire House of representatives is up for election, every single one of the bastards. It's a big opportunity to vote out both factions of the incumbent ruling party. Sure would be cool to see it happen.

That's a hint y'all, you know, in case you really want to, like, do something about this TPP business.

Re:freedoms f----d

[Opportunist]

Actually Europeans have looked up at Americans most of the 20th century. I even distinctly remember a folk song about what kind of celebrations are to be held "now that rich uncle from America is coming".

The change is not as long ago as you might think. It hasn't been more than maybe two decades that people form the US are seen as religious nutjob simpletons who sue everyone and everything if it doesn't go their way. Before that, US people were more seen as rich and self-confident with a "if anyone can accomplish that, I can" attitude that we actually aspired to.

Re:freedoms f----d

[Opportunist]

You know what is meant. Can we sed "can sue" to "can sue AND WIN" and repeat the whole spiel?

Re:freedoms f----d

[Artifakt]

I'm sure that the parent poster can define their own use of the term "rent seeking", but in case you're genuinely unaware of the more common uses of the term, in general, it involves taking a situation where an item or good is normally fully owned by the person who bought it, and making it a situation where the item or good is somewhat changed, so that it must be paid for by perpetual fees, without the payer gaining all the rights they had in the older situation. "Rent seeking" is not the same thing as merely choosing a rental model for seeking profit, rather it's placing blocks before those potential customers who want to instead own the good or item and all the rights that are normally associated with owning that particular item..

                For example, if I own a physical copy of a book, one of the things I may value is that I can use that copy to detect when someone edits the text of a new edition to change what the author actually wrote, particularly if that change is to the author's views on philosophical, political or religious ideas. If my copy of a book is in rented storage 'in the cloud', ownership doesn't come with that ability anymore. Even if storage is made dependent on a one time fee, as for a physical purchase, the persons controlling access gain the ability to charge rent to those persons who want all the rights everybody once had (in this case, casual users may not see a difference, but universities and such can be manipulated into paying regular fees for access to verified, un-tampered-with editions or databases).

              Rent-seeking frequently involves lieing, for example by arguing that ownership never meant you could do absolutely anything you wanted with property, so a publicly ratified speed limit is equivalent to a private lease contract where you agree to let the carmaker give your personal payment data to all insurance companies and receive fees from them. It also involves special privilege (in the most literal meaning of that word, private law) in legislation - for example, the laws in most US states which state there is a contract attached to purchase of a movie theater ticket, even though the patrons don''t see or sign that contract. Such associated methodologies are often an indication that the goal is not merlely to offer something for rent voluntarily, but to coerce.

Re:freedoms f----d

[SuricouRaven]

Patents in pharmacuticals work well.

Their application to software has been a disaster. They are granted so readily and for things so obvious, it's now become a common practice for companies to collect as huge a portfolio of crap-patents as possible just so they can win a legal battle by attrition, then cross-license with sufficiently powerful rivals so they can avoid suing each other into oblivion. It's reached the point where it's impossible to write anything more complicated than Hello, World without potentially infringing a patent somewhere.

Patent reform is needed. Raising costs wouldn't work, as it just disadvantages small companies and individuals. Tougher approval processes would go a long way though, and courts should have more power to penalize patent holders if the patent is later found in court to be obvious, trivial or based on prior art which the patent holder should have been aware of.

Re:freedoms f----d

[K. S. Kyosuke]

and European intellectuals invented all sort of rationalizations for why their supposedly superior culture kept failing while the US was thriving.

Now I'm waiting for American intellectuals to invent all sort of rationalizations for why their supposedly superior culture keeps failing while some developing countries are thriving. ;-)

Re:freedoms f----d

[Rich0]

Patents in pharmacuticals work well...Their application to software has been a disaster.

Something the average software engineer might not appreciate is that patents for pharmaceuticals are a bit like copyright. They cover a specific molecule, which is basically an implementation. Anybody can tweak the molecule and if it works they can sell a competing product. Of course, doing so still costs hundreds of millions of dollars in testing/development costs, so that is why we tend to only have so many molecules in each class.

The patent office sometimes does issue very broad patents in pharmaceuticals, such as patents on a gene or molecular target, but for the most part they tend to get struck down by the courts, for all the same reasons that software patents cause so much trouble.

When applied to a single molecule patents work well in pharmaceuticals because they allow a company to be rewarded for its huge initial outlay in development costs despite their very low marginal cost of production. Now, companies do try to abuse patent law to extend their monopolies and this is something that I fully support punishing harshly. Society makes a deal - we'll pay $7/pill for about 10 years so that we have new pills, but after that anybody can get them for pennies - companies do not have some kind of right to profits - it is the offer society makes because it serves all of our collective interests.

I'm also for having the NIH actually fund more end-to-end drug development where the government bears all the risk of failure, but also owns the patents (which can then be freely licensed to US-based manufacturers, or those in countries who make similar investments and reciprocate). That would in theory lead to drugs that cost pennies from day one, while leaving the private pharma industry intact until such a time as the government-funded model is proven and ramps up and generally takes over (likely slowly hiring all the private pharma employees who actually do R&D/etc).

Re:freedoms f----d

[TheDarkMaster]

Is because of things like this that my country should have nuclear weapons. Then when the United States try to impose shit like this, we can say "fuck you" and blow up Washington if they insist.

Re:freedoms f----d

[TheDarkMaster]

Corporate profit is more important than our lives, is the current mantra of the USA. And then americans do not understand why most of the world hates them.

Re:freedoms f----d

[delt0r]

Patents in pharmacuticals work well.

I have worked for pharmaceutical companies. They work well if you want these companies to make a lot of money. If general health of your population is the goal, then they are a total disaster. You don't work on cures, you work on treatments, for example. Why sell someone a week of pills, when you could sell them pills for a lifetime? Even worse is that a lot of money for these treatments is not invested by the company that holds the patent. But often heavily supported by the state through universities and grants.

The free market, capitalism, fails with health care at every level.

Re:freedoms f----d

[AmiMoJo]

And do you really believe a pharmaceutical company would invest years of lab time and millions of dollars developing a cure for X if the guys down the street would be allowed to immediately copy it and sell it at production cost + 1%?

Let me tell you how it actually works. The really pioneering research is done by universities and government funded labs. They do the really risky, in terms of ROI, work that leads to new medicines and treatments. Once they have something that could be turned into a valuable product they either sell the IP or set up a small company that the big pharma guys can buy. The big companies then make a product, get it approved and sell it for a nice profit. I'm not saying that is an easy or cheap process, but they are not the ones responsible for most of the major advancements. The research they do is mostly aimed at increasing their profits, not improving health.

It would be better if governments just banded together, like say through the EU, and funded the whole process from initial R&D to release themselves, and made it all available for as little cost as possible. Unfortunately there are not enough socialists to make it happen, but that would be the best option for public health and keeping costs down.

The one area where patents have reasonable terms

[penguinoid]

As I understand it, pharmaceuticals are the one area where the duration of patents is about right to offset the massive delays and costs of development (due to more stringent testing requirements than the average product). On the other hand, it also means people die because they can't afford the patented medication. Quite the conundrum.

Secret proceedings, I'm not surprised

[s.petry]

The fact that all of these meetings are being held in secrecy and away from public discourse is very telling. Like NAFTA, this is being touted as something great for free trade, but in fact is intended to benefit an oligarchical subset of society. Worse, that same subset has no consideration for the remainder of the citizens of the USA.

Simple, write your Reps and get them to denounce this garbage legislation. Vote them out of office if they don't denounce this bill and distance themselves. If you have 2 candidates that both want the bill, petition your own candidate on the ballot and lose the cronies.

Be warned too, that just like SOPA this is going to continually be pushed behind the scenes under new names and false pretenses.

Cui bono?

[nickmalthus]

Who are the parties driving this agreement? The corporate lobbyist in China and the US who are secretly drafting this agreement for their own benefit.

As Thomas Jefferson once stated, "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Listen to US billionaire Steve Wynn in his own words call the communist China, where most of his revenue comes from, "the most laissez-faire place on the planet at the moment". When I grew up communism was the evil empire but it appears if they start taking American Express those transgressions are quickly overlooked.

China has illuminated what the most successful government model is for economic growth as they have surpassed the US in global trade and will soon become the largest economy in the world. This secret treaty is an effort to codify the globalist's privileged trading status and would accelerate the vast income inequality that plagues both China and the US. Every American should remember that the revolutionary Boston Tea Party was a reaction to a tax imposed for the direct benefit of the East India corporation's monopoly. Any elected official that privately or publicly supports this travesty should be held accountable at the voting booth.

Re:Cui bono?

[SuricouRaven]

No need. It's been so heavily mythologised, only historians seem to know what it was actually about. Lots of people have somehow come to believe it was a big protest against whatever they dislike.

This is especially amusing in the case of the Tea Party, who took their name from it and believe it to be a protest against high taxation. Taxes were involved - but the key change in tax law that started it was a tax exemption. The British passed a tax on tea, but granted an exemption to the politically well-connected East India Company. This allowed them to undercut independent (And especially colonial) shipping companies on price and drive them out of business. The tax itself wasn't the issue, it was the obvious manner in which a British company had used their lobbying influence to get laws passed to their own advantage at the expense of rivals without such influence. The protester's cause had more in common with Operation Wall Street than the Tea Party movement.

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[s.petry]

Not really a conundrum, the problem is easily solved by making medical research not-for-profit.

Enforced monopolies are bad for society.

New Zealand will sign!

[Maelwryth]

Prime Minister John Key has said that there would be a full public disclosure before signing, also that he feels the left should also be involved as it is very important to have across the board agreement on these polices, also that he has already signed it, also that it has no affect on snapper quota............

I tell ya, living in New Zealand is a little like living in Night Vale at the moment.

Re:New Zealand will sign!

[Mogster]

There might be full public disclosure. But sure as hell we won't have a say in any changes before it is signed. NZ Governments over the past 20yrs, both Labour & National, have run roughshod over democracy (when was the last time a national referendum was heeded?).

I've nothing against free trade but not at the expense of our rights as a sovereign nation, yet that is exactly what John & Co. will allow to happen

Re:OK, if not patents and IP protection, then what

[Anonymous Coward]

Working with knowledge and not bricks does not mean you certainly need a lot more protection.

There are certainly some cost structures that should be changed if we abolish copyright and patents, but it doesn't mean no industry can survive, even the medical industry. Look for example at Aspirin. The patent is gone on it, but its still a big money maker for Bayer. Being first in the market brings considerable advantages. Never mind that the company is german that made it, likely not by chance, because germany has been one of the western countries that had no patent protection for a long time, so the german medical companies started kicking the asses of those outside of germany quite fast.

RD also wouldn't really go up, quite likely the other way around, you can more easily base your research on previous knowledge without having lawyers go through it and what not. The biggest cost that would be harder to recoup is the cost of trials, but these could instead become state sponsored if needed (and there is a good chance that its not all that needed).

This book is just great to understand copyright and patents problems: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/anew.all.pdf

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[Opportunist]

I don't really feel like siding with pharma corps, but considering the development cost, the alternative to people not able to afford medication is medication not existing because there is no ROI on developing it.

You could of course go the European way and have general health care coverage so you can by definition afford the medication, but if I got the general sentiment towards that right something like an affordable healthcare plan is considered evil in the US.

Re:OK, if not patents and IP protection, then what

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you criticize a Democrat, you must be a Republican.
If have a criticism of capitalism, you must be a communist! You hate money!"

Let's not fall down that slippery slope.

This isn't about angry anarchists wanting to abolish patents or completely overhaul IP laws. Citizens are pissed, and rightfully so, because they have NO INFLUENCE on these new policies. Everything is being discussed and decided behind closed doors. Many high ranking politicians do not even have access to the information.

We expect corporations(especially those in big pharma) to be greedy bastards, but when they're lobbying for something, we also expect to be able to protest against the measures we do not like. This isn't the case with the TPP.

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[Opportunist]

Where should these tests be held? I hope the good people of Guinea get lucky, then at least in name it would be fitting.

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[SuricouRaven]

It needs both approaches together. Sometimes research needs the sort of massive funding only commercial interests can provide. Other times there wouldn't be any profit it in (Disease too rare, treatment too cheap) and you need non-profit work from academia, charity or government. Neither is right in all circumstances.

Re:This won't stop until we are in chains

[SuricouRaven]

While I can see the temptation, it isn't going to work so well. That war was of states verses states, with access to military hardware on both sides. A revolution in the US today would consist of semi-organised armies of volunteers with rifles verses a government with long-range artillery, bomber aircraft, advanced intelligence-gathering equipment and much more powerful fully-automatic assault rifles. No contest. The best you could hope for would be a long insurgency, fighting dirty and adopting terrorist tactics of hiding in the civilian population and keeping identities secret, French Resistance style - but that's not enough to overthrow a government. The idea of a violent uprising isn't realistic.

A better proposal would be to shift the rules a bit through technology. A sufficient investment in new forms of communication technology could effectively undermine a lot of commercially-based power - it doesn't matter how strict the copyright laws are if they can't be enforced, and if all communications are encrypted and avoid passing through any bottlenecks where control can be exerted then it becomes much harder for government to monitor or control them. Mass-piracy, properly exercised, could cripple the entertainment-media industry. It just has to be made into something which is near-universally accepted by the public, easy enough for anyone to take part with less effort than buying from legitimate channels, and safe from any form of copyright enforcement.

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[Anonymous Coward]

So we're told, and yet pharmaceutical companies sit as some of the biggest in the world alongside oil companies and banks.

If it were true that patent durations on medicines were essential to recoup the large R&D costs then you would expect that such companies were only just scraping a profit because the patent terms would only just be long enough as it is to make that profit as they claim.

But the fact that their profits are so massively high implies that there's a good chance you could reduce medical patent terms and it'd still be a highly profitable industry.

Thus I suspect the whole thing is a whitewash, and that medical patent terms don't in fact need to be as long as they are.

I can think of one example of why they're going to make profits anyway, Boots, one of, if not the UK's biggest pharmaceutical store used to sell a value range of hayfever tablets that are no longer under patent protection, they cost something like £0.49 for 7 and were all but identical to the £4 box of Bendadryl you could buy. They recently cut this range and now sell their non-value own brand product that is identical in all but packaging for about 5x the price of the value version they used to sell.

So given that the amount of profit they make on a drug seems to be more down to how they want to brand it and how much they want to make then I think the argument that patent expiration kills their product is nonsense. Hell, Lego has become the most profitable toy company in the world in the face of it's patents lapsing and greater competition by way of cheaper clone brands turning up.

So you'll have to excuse me if I'm skeptical of the argument that "reduced patent terms will kill our company". I've yet to see any evidence of it, and any examples industry may throw up seem to be more about corporate failings than an inherent structural need for patents to make some businesses viable.

I'd be intrigued to know how many patented inventions only make their money back over 20 years, I wouldn't be surprised if most patented inventions that don't make their money back in 10 years never do anyway, and that most patented inventions that do make their money back probably do so in less than 5 years, though that's just a guess of course so I could be wrong.

So I don't think medicines are an area where patent terms are reasonable quite frankly, if they were then big pharma wouldn't make the same sorts of exhorbitant profits as banks and big oil do.

Which isn't to say I'm against patents in this respect, I think patents for this sort of thing are absolutely reasonable, but I'm not convinced they need to be as long as they are. I suspect 5 - 10 years would be ample enough time to make your money back.

Embalm, Burn, Bury

[mbone]

Leave nothing to chance.

This is not a free trade agreement, this is corporations attempting to legislate without actually having to deal with pesky legislatures.

Anyone who supports the US Constitution should be against this.

Re:The one area where patents have reasonable term

[The Ickle Jones]

I don't really feel like siding with pharma corps, but considering the development cost, the alternative to people not able to afford medication is medication not existing because there is no ROI on developing it.

You have scientific evidence of this being the case, I suppose? How could you know what would happen in an alternate reality where they don't have these/any patents? Or is it just speculation?