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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

If other countries are sensible, they'd tax (er tariff) American software companies - because a large amount of software is less useful than goods.

A 20% tax on Facebook and Google isn't going to do anything. A 20% on Office 365 is meaningful but only until they find software alternatives from anywhere else in the globe.

As for the US, O365 will not be more expensive but the cost of producing O365 will be. It will be up to execs to determine if they want to pass the costs to the shrinking number of businesses or if they want to eat the cost of production at the expense of shareholders.

Either way, American society is going to eat the cost, either in loss of customers or in loss of 401k.

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If other countries are sensible they'll create funds to contribute to the domestic development of AGPL licensed alternatives as well funds for the development of domestic data centers with the eventual goal of banning the use of American based cloud software altogether.

But that isn't the only option that's available to these other countries:

> Dubbed a “bazooka” by some EU officials when it came into force in 2023, the ACI allows the bloc to select from a wide range of retaliatory measures, such as revoking the protection of intellectual property rights or their commercial exploitation, for example, software downloads and streaming services.[0]

Maybe it's time for other countries to respond by taking the copyright off of American media and setting up their own affordable streaming sites to a global market.

[0] https://archive.ph/PNXt6#selection-2171.0-2175.232

If other countries took the copyright off of American media I would completely support making it illegal to export to them. That would just be theft. Hell, for some people that would probably be enough to justify war.

Would you recommend similar actions from countries that have more stringent intellectual property laws than the United States?

Why or why not?

The harmonization of EU IP laws with American ones was a quid pro quo done in exchange for the adoption of free trade agreements.

If America doesn't want to hold up their end of the bargain why should Europe?

I would hope they at least reverse copy right duration back to something sane like 20 years.

This is certainly a take when China has effectively been doing this for decades. Good luck winning and enforcing a copyright case as a US company in a Chinese court.

The other countries might not place tariffs on tech company products but they can damage these companies in other ways.

I believe the European Union actually has a specific type of anti-tariff policy that they could implement that would eliminate intellectual property protections of software or entertainment companies from countries engaging in trade wars. It’s an option of last resort and I don’t think the EU would actually implement it in response to the Trump stuff but if they did it could be devastating for Silicon Valley and also for Hollywood.

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