Secrecy continues to surround Auckland TPPA negotiations

Five or six hours of presentations were mounted to inform the negotiators. These included some specifically from the ICT sector. The Fair Deal NZ Coalition had a separate lunch with negotiators, at which several five-minute presentations were given.

Don Christie, primarily representing NZRise, but also the open source movement, says the atmosphere was positive, but because of the continuing secrecy surrounding the negotiations, it is hard to say what practical effect the meetings had.

Negotiators professed a desire to "align" the legal frameworks of participating nations, while according respect to each country's individual legal systems, "but they kept saying 'it's complicated'," Christie says.

Discussions on the intellectual property chapter of TPPA were well-attended, he says. "I talked about the specific needs of SMEs, who will benefit from a more flexible IP regime." He also addressed the question of technological protection mechanisms to guard copyright material and the sanctions that TPPA might put in place against circumventing such mechanisms.

Under too strict a TPM regime, an attempt to run an alternative security scheme to Microsoft's Secure Boot under Windows 8, for example, might be construed as such an illegal circumvention, he suggests.