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Comment by andrestan | Hacker News Reader

"enforce its commercial appropriation of European culture, history and stories"

How do you actually mean by this? It seems to me that the vast majority of big Hollywood movies are of US origin and not European. For example see here, http://www.businessinsider.com/highest-grossing-movies-of-20... where only Beauty and the Beast could argued is "appropriation of European culture". If anything, it seems like the EU not enforcing copyrights is an attempt by the EU to itself commercially appropriate US culture. The US populace generally isn't spending its money on imported films from the EU. The reverse on the other hand happens quite a bit.

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You've got it ass about tit, Europeans can't create works based on US culture and sell it to them, but the US did just that to them 100 years ago but then forced crazy copyright on the rest of the world.

No-one can sell derivatives back to the US. The US can use elves, orcs, dwarves, vampires, werewolves, Repunzels, Thors, Lokis, fairy godmothers, Romeos, Juliets, etc. commercially all they want.

But we can't use Supermen, Wolverines, Mikey Mouses, etc. commercially.

I'm not saying it's a bad move from the US pov, but let's not claim it's done for the sake of artists, it's done for $$$ tax revenues and keeping US entertainment as a dominant export.

It's basically an extremely effective one way, heavily US favourable trade embargo that they've codified into international trade law.

While there's little question that the US has extended copyright protections for too long (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act), it truly baffles me that anyone could assert that copyright isn't, in the first instance, done for the sake of the creators. It costs incredible amounts of money/talent to create stories, characters, entire worlds for film or the written word. That some believe creators shouldn't have rights over original stories in order to recoup those costs still makes no sense to me. Let's reward innovation and creators for their contributions to society.

It seems to me that you may be more opposed to a seeming US monopoly on entertainment than you are to the effects of copyright law. You don't argue against the merits or lack thereof of copyrights but rather make distinctions about the US vs Europe. Don't fall victim to mood affiliation.

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