A leading expert on intellectual property has warned that Australian governments could be sued for billions of dollars by foreign companies under a controversial clause in a huge multilateral trade deal. 
The text of the long-awaited Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) - a historic 12-country trade agreement between Pacific region nations, including Australia and the United States - was finally released overnight.
It is the first time voters have had a chance to see what the Australian government has been negotiating on their behalf for more than five years.
Trade Minister Andrew Robb says authorities released the text in "record time" to give people the time to consider its details.
But one of Australia's leading intellectual property experts, Associate Professor Kimberlee Weatherall, from Sydney University's Law School, has criticised a clause in the agreement that gives foreign companies the right to sue Australian governments for introducing laws they say have harmed their interests.
Ms Weatherall has also questioned the adequacy of the "carve outs" Mr Robb says he won that will supposedly make it difficult for foreign companies to sue under certain circumstances.
"The Intellectual Property (IP) chapter of the TPP is an extraordinarily complex, extremely prescriptive chapter that locks in IP settings established decades and even a century ago - at the very time that the Productivity Commission is looking critically at Australia's entire IP arrangements," Ms Weatherall said.
"[And] the adequacy of carve-outs for IP in the Investment Chapter is extremely concerning."
"We could get sued for billions for making some change to mining law or fracking law or God knows what else. We could literally have damages of more than a billion, but we don't actually know. And we won't know until any [law] suit gets started, and then we won't know for another five years while it works through the process," Ms Weatherall said.