3 Count: TPP Minus One

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1: Countries to Sign Trans-Pacific Trade Deal Minus IP Provisions

First off today, the World Intellectual Property Review reports that 11 countries are expected to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) today. However, notably absent from the treaty will be the United States and the intellectual property provisions it pushed so hard for previously.

The TPP, now known as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), was a trade agreement between countries all along the Pacific Rim, including the United States. The U.S., being the largest economy, had pushed hard for intellectual property protections including safe harbor provisions, rules against circumventing digital rights management tools and a copyright term of 70 years after the author’s death across the region. However, the U.S. swiftly pulled out of the agreement after the election of President Donald Trump, leaving its future in doubt.

Now the other 11 countries have moved forward and are signing the new agreement today. However, they have suspended nearly all of the key intellectual property provisions, including the ones above. The section of the agreement went from 75 pages in length to 18, losing nearly all of the U.S. sought changes. The rest of the agreement will be signed today in Chile by the 11 signatories, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

2: Donald Trump Promises Swift Action on Piracy

Next up today, Andy Molt at Complete Music Update reports that U.S. President Donald Trump, in a tweet, said that the U.S. is “acting swiftly on intellectual property theft.” He goes on to say that “We cannot allow this to happen as it has for many years!”

The tweet comes as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) hosted a panel on Capitol Hill looking at streaming piracy. Featuring many high-level speakers in the entertainment business. There, they said that BitTorrent file sharing is becoming “obsolete” and that the future of piracy is streaming, including “fully loaded” Kodi boxes that make it easy to pirate content.

The speakers at the ITIF event also said that the Department of Justice was looking at multiple targets for criminal action, possibly hinting a future wave of arrests in the United States over such Kodi boxes and similar technologies.

3: We Pirated Our Own Video and This Is What Happened

Finally today, Patrick Hall at Fstoppers reports that, in a bid to educate users about piracy, created a fake tutorial and uploaded it to The Pirate Bay for others to download.

The site makes the bulk of their revenue by selling access to high-end photography tutorials. One of their most popular series is Photographing the World with Elia Locardi. But as popular and profitable as the series has been, it has also been widely pirated, creating frustration for those who work on and put up money for the project.

To resopnd to it, Elia worked with Fstoppers to create a fake third part to the series. The mockumentary involved filming at a North Carleston Olive Garden and creating an hour-long tutorial for how to shoot the location. The fake episode quickly rose to number one on The Pirate Bay for searches of the series but has now found a popularity on its own as others have found the joke video to be at least as entertaining as the others in the series.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.