TPP: The Biggest Threat to the Internet You've Never Heard Of.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) is being negotiated in secret between more than 12 countries around the Pacific region. Find out why it poses a huge threat to your digital freedoms.
“The first concern about the TPP is its Article 4, on “Copyright and Related Rights”.
It extends the terms of protection of these rights to the life of the author, plus 70 years. Although this is already part of Australia’s law since 2006, it goes beyond the life plus 50 years from the Berne Convention and will bring all the signatory countries in line with US law.
Copyright extensions have been criticised as being “bad for innovation, bad for the economy and bad for our culture”. This is because extending copyright protection delays creative material going into the public domain and restricts the re-use and remix of older material into something new and innovative.
It also benefits established artists and corporate rightsholders who have bought the rights from the original innovators, at the expense of emerging creators.
Article 4 also prohibits the circumvention of technical measures which are used to protect copyrights. These measures include the restrictions on music files which prohibit the user making copies, on DVDs which prevent the DVD being played in a different region, and on e-books which stop them being read aloud by the computer.
There are some very limited exceptions to this rule, such as for researchers who are trying to ensure the interoperability of computer programs and to investigate security flaws.
Although technical protection measures can protect against copyright infringements, they can also stop plenty of perfectly legal uses of protected material. The circumvention of technical protection measures can be done for legitimate reasons, such as for promoting competition and facilitating innovation.
Yet this is not included in the TPP’s text, and currently the breaking of a technical protection measure will be prohibited, even if it does not constitute a copyright infringement.
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"From [the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations'] work, an evil thesis emerged: Through the use of terror, man can be reduced to a childlike and submissive state, in which his powers of reason are clouded, and in which his emotional response to various situations and stimuli can become predictable, or in Tavistockian terms, “profitable.” By controlling the levels of anxiety, it is possible to induce a similar state in large groups of people, whose behavior can then be controlled and manipulated by the oligarchical forces for whom Tavistock worked."
-- L. Wolfe, “Brainwashing: How The British Use The Media for Mass Psychological Warfare”. The American Almanac, May 5, 1997.
"I know the secret of making the average American believe anything I want him to. Just let me control television. You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV set images."
-- Hal Becker, media guru and management consultant, the Futures Group, in a 1981 interview
"Allowing ourselves to be influenced by the subtle but powerful illusions presented by television leads to a kind of mass madness that can have rather frightening implications for the future of the nation ... We will have begun to see things that aren't there, giving someone else the power to make up our illusions for us. The prospect is frightening, and given our cultural heritage we should know better."
-- Tony Lentz, assistant professor of speech at Pennsylvania State University. "The Medium Is Madness."
"Various types of belief can be implanted in many people, after brain function has been sufficiently disturbed by accidentally or deliberately induced fear, anger or excitement. Of the results caused by such disturbances, the most common one is temporarily impaired judgment and heightened suggestibility. Its various group manifestations are sometimes classed under the heading of 'herd instinct,' and appear most spectacularly in wartime, during severe epidemics, and in all similar periods of common danger, which increase anxiety and so individual and mass suggestibility."
—- Tavistock Institute psychiatrist Dr. Wilham Sargant's 1957 book, "Battle for the Mind"
In 1979 Mark Satin's New Age Politics book was published by Delta with the back jacket comment of the Toronto Star: "He's already miles ahead of the academics and intellectuals who cling to the Marxist vision." Satin prefers to work for a "planetary guidance system" as opposed to "a world government". His guidance system would "regulate society, not organize it."
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