About 18 months ago, we brought you the story of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive free-trade agreement that has been in the works for years—in secret.

On Wednesday, a working draft of the “intellectual property chapter” of the TPP was published on WikiLeaks. Unlike previous leaks, this one is very recent—dating to the most recent negotiating round in August 2013. Importantly, it also has comments and annotations from each country, with their current position on any given provision. The next round of TPP talks is set for November 19-24 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

As we reported last year, the TPP aims to provide “comprehensive market access,” “regulatory coherence,” and, most notably for the tech community, a commitment "to ensure an effective and balanced approach to intellectual property rights among the TPP countries.” The IP chapter represents just one part of the overall treaty.

Not surprisingly, public interest groups, including Public Citizen and many legal scholars, have applauded the leak and have lamented many of the strong IP law provisions that the United States appears to be pushing on its trade partners.

“When you are negotiating an agreement that impacts rights ranging from access to medicine to the duration of copyright protection, you need to solicit meaningful input from broad constituencies if you want a successful outcome,” David Levine, a law professor at the Elon University School of Law, told Ars. “By leaving the flow of information in the hands of Julian Assange, the negotiators have done much to hasten TPP’s demise by underscoring the hyper-secrecy and lack of public input in the formation of law in extremely broad and controversial areas.”

Industry loves it!

The agreement is currently being negotiated among representatives of nine Pacific Rim countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. Japan, Mexico, and Canada have recently entered the negotiations as well.

“I would say it’s ACTA-plus, not ACTA redux,” Gwen Hinze, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) international IP director, told Ars last year. In other words, if you loved to hate the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), then you may love to hate the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) even more.

The United States Trade Representative, the executive branch agency tasked with expressing the American position in these treaty negotiations, declined to comment on the authenticity of the document, but it did not deny it either.

“The intellectual property negotiation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership discussions has not been completed, and a final text has not been agreed to,” Carol Guthrie, a USTR spokesperson, told Ars. “We are working with Congress, stakeholders, and our TPP negotiating partners to reach an outcome that promotes high-paying jobs in innovative American industries and reflects our values, including by seeking strong and balanced copyright protections, as well as advancing access to medicines while incentivizing the development of new, life-saving drugs.”

Who’s in favor of the TPP? So far, the usual suspects: the Obama Administration, the Motion Picture Association of America (PDF), and the United States Chamber of Commerce, to name a few. Most have declined to speak to Ars beyond their published statements.

“Intellectual property-intensive industries account for approximately one in every four American jobs, 60 percent of total US exports, and over one-third of US GDP,” said David Hirschmann, president and CEO of the Global Intellectual Property Center at the US Chamber of Commerce, in a statement in 2012. “Pursuing high-standard, comprehensive, and commercially meaningful intellectual property obligations will not only benefit US interests but will also help bring investment, innovation, and jobs to all TPP economies.”

Letting the air out of Aereo

What are the specific parts that stand out? One, experts say, could jeopardize the entire business model of Aereo, the new Internet TV startup. Another puts the onus of copyright enforcement on ISPs rather than on the copyright holders.Yet another would extend copyright law in other countries to fall in line with the United States, where copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. Many of the proposals now are the same as those that scholars and other legal experts had been concerned would appear last year.

One section that jumps out immediately is an American proposal that would impose new restrictions on television retransmission.

[US propose: Notwithstanding Article QQ.G.16 [limitations and exceptions] and Article QQ.G.14.3(b) [over the air broadcasting reference], no Party may permit the retransmission of television signals (whether terrestrial, cable, or satellite) on the Internet without the authorization of the right holder or right holders of the content of the signal and, if any, of the signal.]

Should that language be accepted—and it’s not clear if it will be, as no other countries have commented so far—that could throw a wrench in Aereo's business plan. The company claims that employing thousands of tiny antennas to capture over-the-air broadcasts for each customer for later viewing—creating a de facto DVR—is perfectly legal. Aereo recently won a major victory at the Second Court of Appeals. ABC, Disney, CBS, NBC, and other studios and TV stations have asked the Supreme Court to hear this case.

"The question presented is: whether a company 'publicly performs' a copyrighted television program when it retransmits a broadcast of that program to thousands of paid subscribers over the Internet," write the petitioners.

Experts say that this type of language appears to be directed at Aereo-like business models and also perhaps at sites like Rojadirecta, a Spanish site accused of copyright infringement of sports games. (The United States dropped a case against Rojadirecta last year and returned the seized domain names.)

“The broadcasters would certainly argue that [this TPP provision] would [outlaw Aereo],” Jonathan Band, of Policy Bandwidth, told Ars. “But Aereo (and the Second Circuit) would say that the Aereo service is not retransmitting the signal. Rather, the user is transmitting his copy to himself.”

A century of protection

Another provision, supported by the US, Australia, and a few others, appears to impose a six strikes-style regime that could ultimately lead to customers suspected of copyright piracy being kicked off their ISP. The provision advocates:

(A) adopting and reasonably implementing a policy that provides for termination in appropriate circumstances of the accounts of repeat infringers

Some legal scholars are hoping that it won’t come to that, though.

“It’s something that can easily be implemented in a very different way,” Sherwin Siy of Public Knowledge told Ars. “I would want to argue that it does not mean the same thing as Six Strikes. What we’ve got in the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] has been interpreted by US courts to mean a certain thing, and we’re comfortable with that. Maybe in other countries it’s how many accusations you’ve got, which is exactly what might take you down that road.”

Finally, a common complaint of the TPP is that it would force other countries to impose an American-style copyright term, which would put a copyright hold on the life of the author plus 70 years. Curiously, Mexico wants to take this a step further and push that limit to 100 years. For works created by a corporation, the United States wants 95 years, while all other countries want 70 years. Mexico wants 75 years for corporate works. Under American law at present, corporate works are protected for 120 years under the so-called “Mickey Mouse Provision” of the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) of 1998.

However, it’s still unclear if the act of leaking the recent draft will have any impact on the negotiations as a whole. After all, they have continued largely unabated for years already.

“Given how much text remains disputed, the negotiation will be very difficult to conclude,” said Peter Maybarduk, a spokesperson for Public Citizen, in a statement (PDF). “Much more forward-looking proposals have been advanced by the other parties, but unless the US drops its out-there-alone demands, there may be no deal at all.”