I think the reason the U.S. is pushing IP so hard is that the world still generally finds copyright law acceptable, the U.S. has much to gain, and other nations feel that they have little to lose.

I agree with the EC doing stupid things. Sometimes I get the feeling they are like the small attention-grabbing child that does something and then asks if anybody likes them yet.

I don’t quite understand your last paragraph. Diplomacy and business are the modern means of warfare. There is always leverage to be gained or lost, decided by how a government balances the the desires of it’s people/sovereignty and the desire to maintain relationships with foreign powers.

Hmm…no. This may be true for Romania, Bulgaria or a few other not-quite-there-yet former soviet satellite nations in europe but where Germany, France and Sweden is concerned people certainly have money. Being “highly socialistic” does not mean either poverty-stricken or lacking in market economies.

What “highly socialistic” tends to mean is overly bureaucratic and lacking certain personal freedoms. Not the ability to make money. Most of the advanced european countries cary the same living standard as americans. The one big difference I could name is that gasoline is on extreme high taxes (approximately 8 bucks a gallon in Sweden, for instance) and that this leads to a certain conservatism when purchasing gas guzzlers.

Other than that, for the most part the outlays in taxes compensate on what you as an american have to spend on insurances, health care, and a lot of the other running expenses. Some large gaps do exist, but the idea that a socialist country is a poor one is trite.

This also assumes that we are talking about the US definition of “socialism”. From my point of view neither Sweden nor Germany have been socialist for decades. Whereas France still carries that legacy, and so on.

As for why we pirate so much – honestly, first of all, for the same reason the US is shock full of pirates. Because it’s today far easier and more convenient to drop something from TPB than it is to get the legal version. Because a cracked game which can run directly from the hard drive is far better than one which is riddled with buggy DRM which impairs your computer.

“Pirate bay did not start in the US and neither did file lockers.”

Napster which started the entire idea about mass-distributed media was from the US. And the US was the birthplace of the “Freedom of Information” movement which eventually led to the EFF and today’s pirate parties. If you want to talk about the genesis of software/media “piracy” in the noncommercial infringement-sense…then we are primarily looking at the US as the birthplace. So that’s not it.

Short-sighted in the extreme as China will take that spot as well in the next decade or some such.

But that’s the real reason why the US is pushing IP so hard. Why the EC is going along with this is anyone’s guess since, to my knowledge, any and all of the latest major treaties have been unilaterally serving US interests over european ones.

Allowing SWIFT to pass the EC in itself is nothing less than financial suicide – sending details of every european financial transaction to the US government (today a major shareholder in, say, GM and Ford) is incomprehensible. But that’s really what the EC is doing these days – giving european company secrets to foreign powers.

Oh, obviously in order to “fight terrorism”. Right.

The argument about political leverage would hold only for as long as there is leverage to be gained. In the case of the US this is obviously not the case. Even less so in the case of the EC.

Everyone and their little poodle has a vested interest in What Other People Should Be Allowed To Say.

The vatican and catholic countries don’t want heresy and abortion talked about too much. Italian politicians are afraid of blogger satire. Corrupt or incompetent bureaucrats and ministers are afraid of unvetted information about their newest deal coming to the “wrong people’s attention”, political dogmatists from the left or right prefer it if the unwashed rabble on the other side could just shut up, and nationalists of every stripe find it to be “unpatriotic” if someone can voice dissent with their chosen nations policies. And christian fundies would like to see less smut around.

What the copywrong industry has done is simply to put lawyers and money behind a root cause which infects all levels of society and can be boiled down to “I wish person A would shut the HELL up about topic B because I find the subject objectionable!”.

Add to that the fact that the US in particular has given up on industrial production and is trying to save it’s position of financial dominance by hoarding Intellectual Property instead and you end up with even more massive piles of political will and money thrown behind the various attempts to regulate any venue of mass communication.

There is no need for a conspiracy of information control here – information control just dangles a lot of false promises in front of so many people, governments and organizations with power and wealth that the net effect looks like a monolithic effort made by behind-the-scenes string pullers. It’s not.

It’s just everyone with an interest in controlling or blocking what is communicated suddenly falling all over each other in trying to get yet another restriction in on that dangerous internet where people can communicate whatever the hell they want.

And that this is inflated by the EC not taking any significant steps to match US output of IP.

So what we really end up with in Europe is a European commission where all the members are literally falling over themselves trying to create and enlarge an already pre-existing trade deficit. In contrast to the standard US response whenever that nation has experienced trade deficits – punitive taxation and trade wars are the norm there.

In that sense the EC is actually serving a foreign country over it’s own citizenry by implementing laws locally which expressly serves the interests of the foreign nation over it’s own.