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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

TechDirt reports

In early November, the "final text" of the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] was finally released. The [United States Trade Representative] even posted the thing to Medium, pretending that after years of secrecy it was now being transparent. As we've been told time and time again, the final document is not open to any changes. The only thing left to do was a "legal scrub" which is a final process in which the lawyers comb through the document word by word, basically to make sure there are no typos or out-and-out errors. The legal scrub is NOT when any substantial changes can be made.

...yet the eagle-eyed Jeremy Malcolm over at [the Electronic Freedom Frontier] has spotted an apparent change in the "legal scrub" of the Intellectual Property chapter that will massively expand criminal penalties for copyright infringing activities that have no impact on the actual market. Technically, the scrub just changed the word "paragraph" to "subparagraph" in the following sentence:

With regard to copyright and related rights piracy provided for under paragraph 1, a Party may limit application of this subparagraph to the cases in which there is an impact on the right holder's ability to exploit the work, performance or phonogram in the market.

[...] It's obviously a significant change that could end up criminalizing plenty of activity that is infringing, but which is totally not for profit and which may have plenty of legitimate uses. There's been a long push by the legacy copyright players to use the TPP to ratchet up criminal penalties, and many of the worst proposals were stripped from the agreement--but, with this "legal scrub", things have moved massively towards criminalization.

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