Above The Law: What If You Could Buy A Country?

You probably haven't thought about it, but chances are that you're intimately familiar with one of the most crucial and defining issues of international trade in the 21st Century. If you've ever downloaded a video game over BitTorrent, pirated an MP3 from Napster, or snagged a movie off of Kazaa you've broken international copyright law. While the music and film industries are frantically trying to stop people like you from getting their content for free, their lobbyists are leaning hard on the United States Government and other Western powers to tighten the enforcement of copyright laws around the world.

It's this issue that's at the heart of the negotiations between the various factions and alliances in the World Trade Organization. Developing1 countries, like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa2 want the United States and Europe to stop subsidizing agriculture. They reason that, absent these subsidies, the higher cost of agricultural production in the United States and Europe will give a comparative3 edge to farmers and agribusinesses based in the developing world. In exchange, the United States and Europe want a crack-down on pirated drugs, movies, software, music, and other "intellectual properties."

But the talks are stalled; and from the looks of things, the Doha Development Round of the World Trade Organization, where all of this was being debated, is going nowhere fast. Though the complexities of international trade negotiations are daunting, the reason Doha is stalled couldn't be simpler: not everyone likes the deal.

Though it is the Western Agribusinesses, with so much to loose in Governmental subsidies, that are largely to blame for the derailing of the talks, another far less influential group has taken notice and is moving to protect its interests: Pirates.