Malaysian Government Backing Away From TPP Support: Worried About Locking Up Medicine

from the good-for-them dept

As the secretive Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations move forward, it appears that some more members are expressing concerns. In the past, we’d noted that politicians in Chile were questioning what benefit there was to being locked into the US’s rules. And, now, another TPP negotiating member, Malaysia, seems to be questioning the agreement. The report claims that the government is now against TPP, though the actual article really only highlights the (significant) concerns from Health Minister Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, who claims that TPP “would be detrimental to the local medical industry.”

“We are against the patent extension. According to the agreement, if a medicine is launched in the US, and then three years later it is launched in Malaysia, the patent would start from when it is launched here and not when it was launched earlier in the US,” said Liow. “This is not fair.”

The end result, he warns, is that the TPP would make healthcare less affordable to citizens of Malaysia. Hopefully he really does represent the views of the Malaysian government and they really are considering dropping out over this issue.

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Comments on “Malaysian Government Backing Away From TPP Support: Worried About Locking Up Medicine”

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15 Comments
Anonymous Coward says:

Are your politicians for sale?

Anonymous is now paying for propaganda videos against granted monopolies 🙂

ps: Anonymous donors that is.

If this video is a hit, it could be the first in a series of videos focused on “online freedom and copyright.” The next one might be tied to the American elections in November.

Why the secrecy? “You see what’s happening with people who are involved in this kind of stuff,” “Andrew” told us. “Especially when you’re directly attacking against political figures. We don’t want to attract unnecessary attention in our lives.”

He said he was motivated by the sight of people being “getting arrested left and right in different countries for various copyright infringement ‘offenses.'” He said that copyright issues “affect pretty much anybody.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/anonymous-donors-bring-hollywood-production-values-to-anti-mpaa-video/

Maybe they do a short on the whole drug monopoly stuff too.

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