Ignoring the leading headline...
The connection between Silicon Valley and Detroit (sorry Detroiters) comes in Article 18.78, which requires countries to have laws allowing companies to protect trade secrets and imposing criminal penalties for violators. The language in this section is broad, but it can certainly be interpreted as implying that governments allow for the enforcement of “non-compete” agreements. Non-compete agreements prohibit employees from quitting their job and working for another company in the same industry for a substantial period of time.
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The restrictions on trade secrets are not the only anti-growth provisions in the TPP. The deal also requires stronger and longer copyright, patent, and related protections. These protections raise the price of the protected items in the same way that tariffs on imports raise prices. The big difference is that copyright and patent protection is typically equivalent to tariffs of several thousand percent, not the single digit tariffs on other items that are being reduced or eliminated in the TPP.
While most proponents of the TPP have opted not to look at the cost of these forms of protectionism it is likely to be substantial. The New Zealand governmentestimated that increasing the duration of copyright protection from 50 years to 70 years, as required by the TPP, would cost it 0.024 percent of its GDP annually, the equivalent of $4.3 billion annually in the United States.
This is the cost of just one small provision in a country that already has strong copyright protection. The costs would undoubtedly be much larger in countries like Malaysia and Vietnam, which don’t currently have strong copyright protections.
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And of course, there are the provisions for the pharmaceutical industry that make patent and related protections stronger and longer. In the United States we spend more than $420 billion a year (@ 2.2 percent of GDP) for drugs that would likely sell for around $40 billion a year in a free market. The goal of the TPP is to make the other countries pay as much as we do, and to lock in place indefinitely high drug prices in the United States. In addition to slowing growth, these protections will also jeopardize public health.