Thank you.
The TPP also seeks to introduce anti-circumvention measures into our copyright laws. In a nutshell, this means that any software limitation which is in some way related to copyright may not be bypassed without breaking copyright law.
A real-world analogy would be that the law that makes it illegal to, say, steal a car would also make it illegal to unlock the car by any means other than the original key. If you locked the key in the car, you could not open it with a coat hanger. You couldn't call a locksmith to open it for you. There wouldn't even be a locksmith because the tools of that trade would be illegal. You wouldn't even be able to make a backup copy of your key in case you lost the original.
Anti-circumvention laws have been in place in the United States for some time now, and they have been widely abused to prevent their abuse and eliminate healthy competition in the market and further business goals that have nothing to do with copyright.
These all come at the expense of consumers and the general public. If the intellectual property provisions of the TPP were tabled independently, I have no doubt they would be shot down quickly. They are objectively not in the public interest, so why are they here? Perhaps because in a document that is thousands of pages long the intellectual property changes feel relatively small.
Consider what would happen if the entire TPP had been presented, not as one monolithic agreement but as a collection of focused proposals that could be evaluated individually. For every country involved, the changes that were accepted would better reflect the values of their citizens. If that public interest were truly the priority, then the TPP would have been presented this way.
Thank you.