International Community Must Stop TPP From Ratification - NGO

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Trans Pacific Partnership’s (TPP) deal must not be ratified, as it criminalizes whistleblowers, unethically strangles global medical copyrights and prevents fair use, among many other issues, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told Sputnik Monday.

Earlier in the day, the United States and eleven other countries of the Pacific-Rim region reached an agreement on the wording and subject matter of the TPP deal. Designed to cover about 40 percent of the global economy, the nine days of negotiations almost stalled due to discrepancies in member-country approaches to the length of copyright protections for new medicine.

“So as long as it contains a retroactive 20-year copyright term extension, bans on circumventing DRM, massively disproportionate punishments for copyright infringement, and rules that criminalize investigative journalists and whistleblowers, we have to do everything we can to stop this agreement from getting signed, ratified, and put into force,” EFF Senior Global Policy Analyst Jeremy Malcolm said.

The TPP deal is expected to be voted on in the US Congress early in 2016.

Uncertain implications for workers’ rights, employment, copyrights, sovereignty and the environment stipulated in the TPP deal have drawn heavy criticism from non-governmental organizations and watchdogs.