Hey, you know what really bothers me? When one country figures that laws passed by their legislature apply to the entire fucking world.

You know who the leading proponent of that idea is? The United States. That’s right, a nation that refuses to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court because it might place their citizens, soldiers and scumbag politicians in legal jeopardy has no issue whatsoever with applying its laws on foreign soil.

It started with the War on Drugs, which dovetailed nicely into the War on Terror, and now American  copyright law is being applied extraterritorally.

For the record, I don’t take issue with the concept of copyright law. I just happen to think that it has historically been unevenly applied, and not infrequently at the expense of the people that actually create shit and in favor of the cocksucker corporations that have a long and storied tradition of robbing creative people fucking blind.

If it were up to me, the creator of something would hold the copyright of their work in perpetuity and the distributor of it – which would be the aforementioned cocksucker corporations – would do so under a license. I think that’s going to happen eventually, but the cocksucker corporations are going to have to bankrupted first.

Unlike in most industries, where something is created by an employee of a corporation, the creative arts are created by people who work under an advance system. The corporation might front you the money to create your work, but an advance is just that, an advance. The corporation deducts that advance money from their net profit before you see a fucking nickle. If your work never turns a profit for the corporation, you’ll wind up owing them money.

Oh, and you get no say in what the corporation’s expenses are. Let’s say that you make the most beautifully record about  coprophilia ever committed to wax and Universal Music decides to take it to market. You get no say in whether or not Universal buys all of the ad time in the world promoting it on the Disney Channel. You’re still paying for it out of your advance, even though you’re pretty sure that kids who like cartons aren’t likely to CDs about people that are turned on by shit.

Better still, when your shit-glory record fails miserably and you find yourself hopelessly mired in debt to Universal Music, Universal Music still owns your work forever. Not only are you professionally and financially fucked because of Universal’s disastrous marketing decisions, you lose the right to own your own, well, shit.

More importantly, illegal downloading – while not exactly helping the entertainment conglomerates – isn’t what’s killing them. Corporate stupidity and a lack of competition is. If you think that investment banking is operating on a suicidal business model, you don’t know the first fucking thing about the entertainment industry.

Look at how many record companies and movie studios there were thirty years ago, compared to how many there are now. Now think of how many truly memorable records and movies there are compared to thirty years ago. You can draw a pretty even line in the decline of both, can’t you?

Does anyone really think that people are going to pay as much for the fifteenth carbon copy of Britney Spears (or the ninth reboot of the Spiderman movies) as they going to for the tenth? Even when each gets progressively more nightmarishly bad than the last?

I would humbly suggest to you that they won’t. If they can’t download it for free for the fucking pop culture irony of saying that they’ve seen it, they’ll just ignore it. It turns out that the mergers and acquisitions culture is working out just as well for the entertainment industry as it did for banking. A lack of competition creates a corporate atmosphere that no sane person wants anything to do with. Sure, you’ll make a fuck-ton of upfront money, but you’ll wind up running into the arms of big government the second the market wises up to your horseshit. And the market has decidedly wised up to their horseshit.

If the goddamned government managed to stop piracy tomorrow – which it won’t – those cuntish mega moguls would still be broke in five years. Those dopey cunts really do believe that if they eliminate the possibility of your taking their garbage for free, that you’re actually stupid enough to pay for it, while blissfully ignoring the fact that their product is fucking garbage

That’s not even what I want to argue. What I want to point out is “who in the fuck is the United States to shut down a Hong Kong-based company and arrest folks in New Zealand based on the whimsy of shitheel motherfuckers like Chris Dodd, formerly the United States Senator from CountyWide and currently the president of the MPAA?” And make no mistake, this is all about the infinitely power-drunk and suicidally moronic desires of Washington’s lobbyist assholes.

Let’s now consider that you’re a judge in someplace like Spain or Italy, and you have credible evidence that the United States government carried out the kidnapping of someone legally on your soil, and taken the victim to some shithole like Syria, Lybia or Egypt, where they were tortured without due process of law. That violates literally dozens of laws or international conventions, most of which the United States was party to. How well do you think that Washington is going to respond to your “tough on crime” posture?

People who have never set foot in America, and are merely accused of committing crimes against suicidal industries can lose the liberty and have their property seized with impunity. But American policymakers, who have arguably committed crimes against humanity can traverse the globe with impunity, irrespective of what the law anywhere says.

At some point, the extraterritorial application of domestic laws in going to work both ways. And Americans aren’t going to like the way that looks.