As the world’s most innovative economy, strong and effective protection and enforcement of IP rights is critical to driving innovation, creating economic growth, and supporting American jobs. TPP reflects strong rules that will promote exports and protect U.S. creativity while simultaneously promoting the sort of balance that ensures open, innovative, and technologically-advanced economies in the Asia-Pacific region.

HOW TPP PROMOTES INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

Strong and balanced IP standards are critical for driving innovation and protecting American jobs. TPP requires parties to:

• Establish strong patentability standard, with appropriate limitations drawn from international commitments, to protect the jobs and solutions to global challenges generated by U.S. innovators in areas ranging from solar panels to smart manufacturing.
• Adopt strong copyright protections – drawn from international norms – to respect the rights of creators and establish clear protection of works such as songs, movies, books, and computer software, and to facilitate the development of new business models for distributing creative content that keeps pace with evolving technology.  
• Include – for the first time – an obligation that requires Parties to continuously seek to achieve an appropriate balance in copyright systems through, among other things, exceptions and limitations, to copyright for legitimate purposes, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, and clarifies that exceptions and limitations are available for the digital environment
• Establish copyright safe harbors for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to develop their business, while also helping to address Internet copyright infringement in an effective manner. TPP includes no obligations on these ISPs to monitor content on their networks or systems, and provides for safeguards against abuse of such safe harbor systems.  
• Promote access to medicines by facilitating not only the development of innovative, life-saving drugs and treatments, but also the spread of generic medicines. This includes commitments in TPP that build on the principles underlying the “May 10^th Agreement,” which based flexibilities for certain pharmaceutical provisions on the level of development and capacity of individual trading partners. TPP also aligns with the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health and affirm the rights of countries to take measures to protect public health.