Hollywood Is Hardly An Innocent Victim In Trade Disputes

from the poetic-justice dept

My Cato colleague Sallie James describes the ongoing standoff between the US and the rest of the world at the World Trade Organization over gambling. When Congress banned online gambling, tiny Antigua filed a complaint alleging that the actions violated WTO rules. Antigua won, but the United States has so far bullied them out of taking advantage of their victory. The US has threatened to retaliate against Antigua if the latter begins targeting US copyrights as authorized in the trade ruling. James says that the United States is in the process of negotiating alternative compensation, including increased access to other American services markets. If that deal falls through, she warns, Hollywood might find itself "footing the bill" for the US government's ill-conceived gambling ban.

I certainly agree with her that the gambling ban was a bad idea, but I'm not sure it makes sense to paint Hollywood as an innocent victim here. After all, Hollywood has been pushing for decades to link trade policy and copyright law, going so far as to support free-trade agreements that include terms micro-managing other countries' copyright policies and requiring them to enact laws like the DMCA as a condition of access to American markets. Free traders rightly object when special interests try to use free trade agreements as a way to coerce countries into enacting their preferred labor and environmental policies. We should be equally incensed when Hollywood lobbies for the use of trade agreements to coerce countries into enacting their preferred copyright policies. So there's a certain amount of poetic justice in the fact that Hollywood has found its copyrights in the crosshairs of a trade dispute. James also correctly notes that retaliatory tarriffs are an insane way to impose damages on the losing country in a WTO dispute because tariffs hurt consumers in the "winning" country at the same time it hurts producers in the "losing" country. In contrast, if damages are imposed by targeting copyright law, consumers in the winning country will actually be made better off by lower prices for the copyrighted products in question. So while it would be best of Congress repealed its idiotic gambling ban, I'm not going too upset if Hollywood's attempts to link copyright law to trade policy come back to bite them.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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New Chinese Taxes May Explain Export Slowdown

from the that's-all? dept

Last week we linked to a story about slowing export growth from China and wondered what it meant about both the US and Chinese economies. Obviously, slower trade could be a reflection of a weakening economy, although it also seemed possible that the mounting concerns over the quality of Chinese goods could be a contributing factor. Today, the Wall Street Journal notes the same trend, but offers a much more sanguine perspective. The claim is that the Chinese government has instituted a new tax on exporters, which will kick in later this year. As such, manufacturers have tried to front-load their sales, squeezing as much of their annual orders out before the tax comes into place. The Chinese government has tried hard in recent years to slow down the economy, which has been on fire. While this tax may result in a temporary slowdown, it's unlikely that it will do much to alter the fundamental economic equation of high American demand for cheap supply from China.

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