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The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative is conducting closed-door negotiations for a new trade deal involving intellectual property – the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Big Hollywood and Big Pharma are involved and are allowed to see negotiation documents. The public is not. Once the deal is concluded, it could bind Congress to change IP law and restrict free-speech, fair-use, and access-to-information rights.

In a brash move snubbing the lobbyist-challenged public, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative decided to cancel a very limited opportunity for people to voice their concerns at a “stakeholder” meeting.

The following is an abridged version of a letter to the signed by many legal academics to the U.S. Trade Representative, Ambassador Ron Kirk.

The letter was written by law professors David S. Levine of Elon, Christopher Jon Sprigman of UVA, and Sean Flynn of American U.

Dear Ambassador Kirk:

We write as legal academics from the US and current or potential future Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) member countries to express our profound concern and disappointment at the lack of public participation, transparency and open government processes in the negotiation of the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). We are particularly and specifically concerned that the United States Trade Representative (USTR) took the opportunity of its hosting of the latest round of negotiations in Dallas, Texas, to begin this week, to further restrict public involvement in the negotiations by eliminating the full-day stakeholder forums that have been hosted at other rounds. We call on the USTR and all TPP negotiating countries to reverse course and work instead to expand, rather than contract, the opportunities for public engagement in the formation of the TPP’s intellectual property chapter.

At a time when the last international intellectual property law to be negotiated under a similar process, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, teeters on the edge of rejection by the European Parliament in large part because of the loss of faith in its secretive process demonstrated by hundreds of thousands of marchers across Europe, the move to scale back participation in the TPP appears highly unwise and counterproductive. The functional and theoretical impact of the lack of transparency and accountability in the TPP and other trade negotiations institutionalizes the kind of process that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan criticized as policy making through “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.” This is no way to build support for a broad reaching new international law that will constrain democratic law making over intellectual property matters in the US and abroad, particularly in an era of massive and rapid technological change that is testing the bounds of our current policy framework.

Our first and most important suggestion is to immediately begin a policy of releasing to the public the kind of reports on US positions and proposals on intellectual property matters that are currently given only to Industry Trade Advisory Committee members under confidentiality agreements. The USTR has previously refused to share its own proposals with its own citizenry claiming that, under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to do so would damage the national security of the United States. …

Our concerns flow from the now-established observation that “trade” agreements no longer focus exclusively, or perhaps even predominantly, on the regulation of trade. Rather, the agreements increasingly propose international law standards that bind the legislative branch to change, or lock in place, domestic regulatory decisions. …

Unfortunately, there is little about the TPP negotiating process that is open to the broad range of inputs that would be reflected in domestic policy making. There has been no publicly released text of what USTR is demanding in these negotiations, as there would be in policy making by regulation, in Congress or in multilateral forums. Reviews of leaked proposals show that the US is pushing numerous standards that are beyond those included in any past (i.e. publicly released) agreement and that could require changes in current US statutory law. Reviews also show that the US proposal is manifestly unbalanced – it predominantly proposes increases in proprietor rights, with no effort to expand the limitations and exceptions to such rights that are needed in the US and abroad to serve the public interest. …

The unbalanced product results from an unbalanced process. The only private individuals in the US who have ongoing access to the US proposals on intellectual property matters are on an Industry Trade Advisory Committee (ITAC) which is dominated by brand name pharmaceutical manufacturers and the Hollywood entertainment industry. There is no representation on this committee for consumers, libraries, students, health advocacy or patient groups, or others users of intellectual property, and minimal representation of other affected businesses, such as generic drug manufacturers or internet service providers. …

All of the above makes the most recent further withdrawal from the TPP negotiation of a limited participation venue particularly disturbing. … While far from ideal for all involved, including the USTR and its ITAC advisors, this mechanism at least allowed for some exchange, even if that exchange was fundamentally flawed and artificially limited in value because of the information-disparity problems discussed above. In the place of these full day open forums in Dallas, USTR has channeled stakeholder input into a 4-hour mid-day (10:30am-2:30pm, i.e. over the lunch hour) exhibit hall for stakeholder tables. There will be no opportunity, as in the past, to speak to assembled negotiators through presentations. …