With the stroke of a pen from President Donald Trump, the United States officially withdrew Monday from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed and controversial 12-nation trade pact dealing with everything from intellectual property to human rights.

"Everybody knows what that means, right? We’ve been talking about this for a long time," Trump said as he signed the order and made good on his campaign promise to remove the US from the trade deal. "A great thing for the American worker." During the election campaign, he called the TPP a "disaster."

President Barack Obama had praised the pact, but it was put on life support just days after Election Day. That's when congressional leaders told the White House that it would no longer consider entering the pact with a lame-duck president. The failing deal was of interest to Ars due to how intellectual property would have been treated. As we noted, "the TPP exported US copyright law regarding how long a copyright lasts. For signing nations, the plan would have made copyrights last for the life of the creator plus 70 years after his or her death. That's basically the same as in the US."

The nations remaining in the sputtering pact include Japan, Australia, Peru, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Chile, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, and Brunei. China has proposed a 16-nation free-trade bloc that includes India. The Trump administration is expected to begin trade negotiations with each TPP nation separately.

The Motion Picture Association of America had hailed the TPP when the 2,000-page text of the pact was released in 2015, after negotiations were carried out in secret. "The TPP reaffirms what we have long understood—that strengthening copyright is integral to America’s creative community and to facilitating legitimate international commerce," Chris Dodd, the MPAA chairman, said at the time.