Oh goody: A recent WikiLeaks document dump of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement reveals that the deal compels Internet service providers to hand over the identities of copyright infringers to rights holders. ZDNet has done a very thorough deep dive through the leaked documents and has found that ISPs are about to be responsible for keeping track of which of their customers frequently infringe upon copyrighted material and for reporting those infringing users to content creators.
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The relevant section here is Article I7, which ZDNet reports “mandates that each party to the TPP must establish a judicial or administrative procedure through which rights holders can obtain the identity of a copyright infringer from an ISP in a timely and efficient manner” so they can protect themselves against further infringement.
Interestingly, this latest version of TPP seems to have significantly changed the language to favor rights holders compared to earlier drafts. In earlier versions, for example, TPP did not want ISPs to bear major costs for tracking down and identifying alleged pirates. ISPs in this version of TPP, which WikiLeaks claims is the final version, will now have to “expeditiously remove or disable access to material residing on their networks or systems upon obtaining actual knowledge of the infringement.”
For a more thorough analysis of what’s in the TPP’s intellectual property chapter, check out ZDNet’s full report here.
