Re: <nettime> ttip: digital respect and resistance

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 2015-10-10 00:48, Kristoffer Gansing wrote:

> I am just curious to see what kind of response it will evoke!
> Especially I am curious if the nettime community has anything to say
> about the supposed fear of dealing with TTIP within digital art and
> culture, well knowing of course that there is an assumed "field"
> here that might already be declared obsolete or for which there are
> many names and definitions.

Hi Kristoffer,

> These questions haunts me on a daily basis as I try to balance my
> intensive working life of being the artistic director of a big
> digital art and culture festival such as transmediale with also
> being an engaged citizen....

I think this is the key issue. Things like TTIP challenge everyone as
a citizen, as basic democratic rights are being undermined and extreme
forms of corporate governance are being enshirned in hard-to-change
international law. Everyone is affected by this, artists in particular
through the intellectual property provisions.

WIKILEAKS published yesterday the respective section of the comparable
TPP agreement where negotiations have been concluded. (see below)

But intellectual property which affects many of us in our professional
lifes is only a small aspect of the type of deep rule setting that is
taking place on a scale almost too big to comprehend, certainly from
the vantage point of art.

So, how do we align our narrow and specialized identities as
"artists", "researchers" and so on and with more broadly shared
identities such as "citizen" or, in case of climate change, "living
being".

In types of hyper-specialization it seems almost impossible to
acknowledge that in may respects, each of us is not uniquely special,
but, that tiny peaks of specialization grow out of oceans of
commonality .


Felix

TPP Treaty: Intellectual Property Rights Chapter - 5 October 2015

https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/press.html

Today, 9 October, 2015 WikiLeaks releases the final negotiated text
for the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Intellectual Property Rights
Chapter. The TPP encompasses 12 nations representing more than 40 per
cent of global GDP. Despite a final agreement, the text is still being
withheld from the public, notably until after the Canadian election on
October 19.

The document is dated four days ago, October 5th, or last Monday,
the same day it was announced in Atlanta, Georgia that the 12 member
states to the treaty had reached an accord after five and a half years
of negotiations.

The IP Chapter of the TPP has perhaps been the most controversial
chapter due to its wide-ranging effects on internet services,
medicines, publishers, civil liberties and biological patents. âIf
TPP is ratified, people in the Pacific-Rim countries would have to
live by the rules in this leaked text,â said Peter Maybarduk, Public
Citizenâs Global Access to Medicines Program Director. âThe new
monopoly rights for big pharmaceutical firms would compromise access
to medicines in TPP countries. The TPP would cost lives.â

Hundreds of representatives from large corporations had direct access
to the negotiations whereas elected officials had limited or no
access. Political opposition to the TPP in the United States, the
dominant member of the 12 negotiating nations, has increased over
time as details have emerged through previous WikiLeaks disclosures.
Notably, the Democratic front runner, Hillary Clinton, came out
against the TPP on Wednesday saying: âBased on what I know so far,
I canÂt support this agreement.â This is a populist reversal by
Hillary Clinton as earlier she has hailed the TPP as âthe gold
standard in trade agreementsâ.

In June the House of Representatives of the US Congress narrowly
approved to âfast-trackâ the TPP, preventing the Congressmen
from discussing or amending any parts of the treaty, only vote for
or against it. 218 voted for the âfast-trackâ measure and 208
against. Only 28 House Democrats backed it. TPP is the first of a
trinity of US backed economic treaties, the "Three Big Tâs", to be
finalized. The other two being Trade in Services Agreement (TISA)
which covers 52 countries and TTIP, the EU-US version of TPP.


Read the document. https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/




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