It's from Australia about a month ago. The article's at the link. As you can see, the pharmaceutical industry did not get what the 12 years it wanted.

Another site, The Bio-Pharma Reporter, says the agreed period is actually a minimum of 5 years, but the article explains how it can be "about 8" in effect.

"Before this final round of negotiations in Atlanta, only a handful of issues remained in the way of concluding the massive 12-country trade and investment agreement. One of them – a potential deal-breaker for Australia – was intellectual property protections for biologics, which are expensive medicines derived from living organisms.

Market exclusivity
In the United States, biologics are protected from competition by follow-on products (known as biosimilars, which are akin to generic medicines) for 12 years from the time they’re first granted marketing approval by the nation’s drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This form of protection from competition is distinct from a patent. It prevents a follow-on product from entering the market even when any patents on the originator product have expired.

These 12 years are known as the market exclusivity period. In the TPP negotiations, the biopharmaceutical industry has been insisting the United States push its potential partners to adopt a similar period of exclusivity, together with a whole series of other onerous intellectual property provisions, such as requirements to allow patenting of diagnostic, therapeutic and surgical methods of treatment, and of new forms, uses, or methods of using medicines."

Funny all the countries party to this agreement, past agreements, and likely future agreements, don't find that provision a problem. I guess all these countries -- including Scandinavian countries -- are just corporate shills.

It's been going on for a half century and seems to be working more or less well.

I do think O'Malley's views on replacing it with a political risk insurance scheme are worth looking at, but this isn't GDP so I'll leave it at that.

The arbitration process is also how AFL has been able to successfully sue Mexico for preventing workers from organizing, and Sierra to sue for lowering environmental protections.

I would never favor an agreement to lend legitimacy to a nation that was executing any minority, you do. We are very different people with ethical worlds that do not mesh.

You're pointing out all of the problems with Brunei, which I have strongly agreed with. I'm still not seeing where not signing the TPP helps anything on those issues.

just that by allowing our people to trade with and travel to and from them, by not taking other steps we could. Your ethical world happens to be the same one we all inhabit.

A superiorly ethical person will remember that each time he's at the grocery store or shopping in a mall. Take his computer with him so he can examine the background of each item as carefully as possible.

One guess WHY that nice shirt costs only $20 from first clearing the land. manufacturing dyes, etc., to hanging on the rack. Wouldn't it be nice if the label estimated how many people in which industries and which nations worked for just enough to survive day to day so we could purchase it at that price?

Did the farmer who grew that nice $0.30 lime at our supermarket have to pay off a criminal cartel to be allowed to grow and sell it to a giant international corporation at monopoly prices that are ruining him? You know about coffee, of course, and I'm assuming you have given that up.

Since you clearly do wish to be ethical, why not FIRST comb this agreement to see if the people who say it does institute some controlling measures and pressures toward better treatment of labor are telling the truth? Knowing the truth, whether it pleases or not, is the FIRST step necessary step to knowing what constitutes ethical behavior in each situation.

You might even find you were obliged to SUPPORT even a badly flawed TPP ethically over continuing as we were. In fact, I'd put money on an ethical person finding himself in just that conundrum. What to do? Where lies the greater duty?

Thanks for that.