Rising tensions with the U.S. are spurring new plans in Europe to do something that has long seemed impossible: break with American technology in favor of homegrown alternatives.
President Trump this week dropped his threat to take control of Greenland by force if necessary. But even the possibility of armed conflict with allies has injected new urgency into long-simmering debates in Europe about how to reduce its reliance on U.S. tech infrastructure and tools that support swaths of the economy.
The worst-case scenario for European officials? A White House executive order that cuts off the region’s access to data centers or email software that businesses and governments need to function.
Simple countermeasure: Reject intellectual property of American companies. The mouse and the other lawyer thugs will knock at Trump’s door the Plancksecond this happens.
The deal was “sign this free trade agreement that includes our intellectual property laws and we will give you free access to the US market” but now the US has imposed tariffs on EU goods so there’s really no reason to continue honoring US IP laws.
Heh. No way. The EU has much more onerous IP laws than the US. That’s one reason why the EU can’t compete in tech.
EG search engines like Google process copyrighted content to make it searchable. When they started in the 1990s that would have been plain criminal in Germany. Once the internet turned out to be a big thing, this was legalized.
We can now see the same thing with AI. It’s just not possible to be competitive for European companies. Companies like Huggingface (originally French) or Elevenlabs (Polish) fucked off to the US. Mistral stayed in Europe and is being left behind. The early models with which they made a splash were almost certainly trained illegally, but the AI Act made it clear that Europe would double down on past mistakes.
Despite the fact that European IP laws hurt our economy and culture, they have only been expanded in the last decades. Despite the fact that the major content owners are American.
Good point, you can never adapt laws to a changing world in the face of a new disparaging hostile relationship with the leader of the old world order. They came on high, law and order written on unmalleable stone tablets.