Let me try to write something that may permit and generate fruitful discussion. Do you think the repeated US copyright-term extensions, widely attributed to Di

Let me try to write something that may permit and generate fruitful discussion. Do you think the repeated US copyright-term extensions, widely attributed to Disney, have been good public policy? Patent IP (Industrial Policy;) has lots of knobs and dials (duration, obviousness, scope, FRAND, etc) - do you think their current settings, nailed down by US pharma, are well adjusted to support innovation in other industries, like say tech? Do you think California's severe limits on non-compete employment agreements are bad for innovation? No? Neither do some other countries. For example, TPP was spun as a free-trade treaty. But it was also sometimes described as bag of multiple treaties. One, free-trade. But also "IP" (copyright and patents). And ISDS. Let's leave the mess of ISDS aside. When the US dropped TPP, it was continued by other countries as CPTTP, keeping the free trade parts, and dropping IP and ISDS. After a time, the US came back with USMCA, forcing their inclusion. Canada was forced to agree to change its laws, to extend its copyright term. Something the US had long tried to force, and Canada had long resisted. The canadian press described it as arm twisting, and coercion. Here are US trade negotiators, acting, at root, on behalf of Disney. Why pay for regulatory capture piecemeal, country by country, when the US provides one-stop shopping for world-wide regulatory capture? If Russia, with declining oil revenue and growing trade imbalance, but having nukes and bioweapons, forced the United States to permit the mass importation of Russian-provided narcotics, dwarfing the current opioid epidemic, would you be pissed? Yes, the Chinese still are. But this isn't some vague "trigger" similarity. US trade negotiators, on behalf of the subcultures in which they're embedded, and the interests which determine their positions, are trying to coerce them. As with Canada and others. Maybe China will fold too. Or maybe not. Canada did push back on ISDS. Call it a conflict of two cultures of corruption. In one, large incumbents do regulatory capture, and use it as moat, to avoid a threateningly competitive and innovative market. In the other, everyone pays off the government, and there's lots of other ugliness, but... there's a ferment. Current US press coverage of China repeated reminds me old regime Europe writing about the US in 1800's. The US economy and governance and society were really corrupt and messy. And they changed the world. And the world is perhaps fortunate, maybe, that the dismal stagnation of Europe was unable to stifle that. [Fyi, I'll likely not follow up on comments - sorry, I lose days that way. And this isn't the kind of topic HN does well. But there seemed some significant bits absent from the discussion, at least as of when I started writing this. So I toss it out there, FWIW.]