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No I do not think it's an original concept of the US, more that it was the US that conditioned many other countries to adopt similar laws as a condition for trade deals / investments.

As a concept it existed in one way or the other pretty much ever since the printing press.



It is not difficult to find that the "US conditioning other countries in the 1970's" actually started in 1886 at the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention when 10 european countries agreed on legal principles to protect original works. Among these 10, France, Germany, Italy, France and UK, so in practice the whole Western Europe. US didn't join until 1989.

The original treaty, if I am not misunderstanding here: https://www.wipo.int/en/web/treaties/ip/berne/summary_berne includes a "dead + 50 recomended" protection since the 1908 revision, before that it was up to each country laws, and in 1948 it changed to "dead + 50 minimum mandatory". In 1993 it was raised to "dead + 70" in the UE, to be followed by the US with the same extension in 1988 in Sonny Bono Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act.


I want you to look at that summary you've posted again, specifically the TRIPS part of it. Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights only came into force in 1995. Is that not the evidence that the rest of the world was strongarmed into adopting similar laws? The EU, Japan and a few others definitely supported the US in this initiative, but it was the US that heavily lobbied for it. Before TRIPS came to be, copyright effectively didn't exist in most of the world (yes, Western Europe excluded).

You're not contradicting anything I'm saying, you're just saying the same thing with more words because you don't understand where my argument comes from. What I don't understand is why you would even want to take credit for such a broken system to begin with.




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