Berman’s only problem with Allofmp3 is that it is not his US M.A.F.I.A.A. running the business in Russia.

it’s actions like this that make globalism more difficult to provide any traction with reasonable people, if this exemplifies what globalism appears to be, strongarming and intimidating other nations into stupidly unified, one-sided policy.

while IP is a soft issue on the scale of things, i believe IP is being utilised as a leverage issue used by a few entrepreneurs and brokers to set up eminent domains in an international digital marketplace. it’s ridiculous to try and hold millions of people’s rights to their entertainment hostage to the whims of so few with so much money and power.

the kinds of things that occur at the behest of media barons like sony, emi, warner bros, fox under the guise of free association and IP are immoral at best. these companies have far too much money to be safely appreciated, and with money comes the need to flex those incorporeal muscles over institutions and governments that get in the way, as seen by companies like enron, MPAA, RIAA, etc. any company that decides to regulate their industry and then appeal to the government to change things, with money, and power, have some serious social issues to deal with, that they are wholly incapable of reasonsing out or recognising.

it all smacks of a conspiracy to commit all U.S. fearing nations to a unilateral, U.S. dominated IP domain, where other dehumanising forces such as narcotics, pharmaceuticals, arms, military and guerilla/terrorist actions, immigration, labour markets and human smuggling is so tacitly ignored as are other more pressing, real international issues.

if the relationship wasn’t so monogamous with american and british artists having a lot more presence than say indian, african, chinese, russian, korean artists in this new order, people might be understandably more considerate. but this smacks of bullying, especially when put next to other examples of US legislation trying to operate in foreign countries i.e. the piratebay.org raids.

it also seems implausible to make IP laws found in the free trade agreements signed by various nations, the tipping point for a globalist, international set of unified international law.

and it is always thoroughly alienating to censor and restrict any group of people. once the behaviour of following the U.S. government’s desires is set into place, it will be enormously difficult to move people away from draconian ideas, punishments and IP owners losing rights to foreign-owned corporations declaring ownership of entire nations of artist’s work and the rights to legally, economically and proactively punish those who don’t agree.

i still believe it would be easier to unify global law with humanitarian rights over various nations than to try to rule the behaviour of the few people who listen to music or movies, locally and internationally. but apparently bureuacrats have other ideas.

the obvious thing would be to have patents, royalties and globally spanning digital technology be something governed by a non-profit international cartel assigning indivual owner’s and author’s rights rather than ownership by corporations and domains, rather than a for-profit bank of divisional intellectual property.

by having the people from hundreds of nations invest their ideas and intellectual capital in a global IP bank, there would be a single domain and font of IP from which to make spurious claims to authorship and propiety, partial authorship and franking of rights to third party users as royalties, etc.

it would obviously have to be equally ubiqutous, globally spanning and accessible for useful international trading rights, and it makes for an easier method of regulating and governing resources between sovereign rights holders, an author’s sponsor, contractor or patron and those arguing that their design holds a sovereign international identity by deign of this IP bank’s records.

i think artists and managers would be equally at home exploiting one another under this system as the current one, but quite arguably an imperfect-world solution that won’t happen.