The US has transitioned from an industrial economy to a “service economy” and is beginning to take the next steps further. Also, by now the US corporations have destroyed many of the meatspace production sectors in the entire nation by off-shoring massive parts of their production and development capability to China, India and other low-cost countries. Detroit no longer produces cars. Plastics, paints, etc. come from China. The electronics is “designed in California, made in China”. The list goes on.

What is left? It’s Hollywood, the music industry, medical industry, software, patents, all sorts of intellectual property. There is plenty of that! The drive is to twist the world into accepting intellectual property as if it were something tangible. The US pushes this hard because it is the only thing they have left. The idea is not to own the methods of production, but to own the instructions for the methods of production, and make others pay for using the instructions.

A problem appears when the rule-setters don’t play by their own rules. Case Håkan Lans is a good example. However, this is an understandable course of action when seen from the previously described perspective. Patent fights with foreign companies and screwing foreign inventors over is necessary as their survival is at stake. What is intellectual property at its heart? It has no real value – it’s just a pile of contracts. To make the gamble which the USA is doing work, there must be a global unified acceptance of these contracts. This is pushed via ACTA, SOPA, PIPA and other treaties. The key is this: if the world is not unified behind accepting these piles of contracts as properly valid, then what happens? The IP-heavy regime, which US focuses on, will simply fail. They can’t keep on making movies for a profit when over half of the planet pays them nothing for it. Once the IP-heavy regime fails, US will not have much more left, and they cannot print more dollars to get out of that mess, the problem is simply too big. Also, they cannot reverse the falling trend by taking back the meatspace production, unless they start now – they cannot do this because of the short-term corporate profit motive prevents such strategic investments. Therefore, once the world-wide rejection grows via the Pirate Party movements and others, a collapse will be imminent.

This is why they fight nail and tooth against all intellectual property violations. It’s a matter of survival for them. Yarn Shops in the Midwest