[dexy]

Don't forget, there are many reasons why American businesses are so successful. Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. You may disagree, but there's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement. Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. If getting everything for free is more important to you, then only consume open source content.

America doesn't want to force Sweden to obey copyrights just because Microsoft needs Swedish business, it does so because Sweden backing pirates sets a standard for the rest of the world that could very easily lead to a global breakdown of copyright law and less high quality content for everybody, whether they can afford it or not.

[burgerbrain]

"here's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement"

And nothing of value was lost...

[pbhjpbhj]

>Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. //

In the UK I expect a lot of it is to do with mobilisation of GIs in WWII.

>Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. //

Well actually it's more like £15 GBP which is >$20 ($25-23 this year, I think being out by a factor of 2 is notable) for some of us.

That aside it's not exactly an efficient process and the capitalist system appears to have no interest in making it more affordable. Why do actors get paid multi-million dollar sums for doing a movie, why do we support this sort of thing through copyright. Yes I know that's not the limit of it, there's much much more to copyright but you picked on big-budget movies.

If the copyright term on a blockbuster movie was 10 years do you think that movies wouldn't be made any more? Absolutely not. There would be more of them IMO with more drive to creativity. Why on Earth do we protect movies to such an extent when inventions are limited to c. 20-25 years.