The Berne Convention (of September 9, 1886) was formed for the purpose of protecting intellectual property.

It has been quoted by most American Politicians for the last 10 years as the reason why America needs to get tough with the P2P community.

Its interesting, that the United States only became a signatory to the convention (see USA details for accession date) on November 16, 1988,  a mere 90 days after the first news story surfaced about Echelon. (18 August, 1988 - scroll down to the August 18 entry)

In other words prior to that date, the United States did not recognise the validity of Intellectual Property outside it’s borders.

With its penetrative Deep Packet Inspection policies, implemented initially through Echelon, then via triplet encryption keys in windows, and now Ak..... and some hardware vendors, it could be argued that the United States still doesn’t recognize the value of Intellectual Property except where it pertains to the wealth and well being of its natives, office holders or corporate entities.

Many wonder why the European Parliament is concerned about Intellectual Property protection. (ACTA)

An article from ZDNet explains part of the nature of the problem.

Duncan Campbell's Scientific and Technical Options Assessment (STOA) April 2000 report to the European Union entitled Interception Capabilities 2000 states that those governments implicated in Echelon routinely monitor commercial communications. This report also states that in the US a process was developed "whereby NSA data could be used to support commercial and economic interests."

The United States didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of young hackers finding extraordinary methods of obfuscating, encrypting and misleading DPI into not being able to read the commercial data therein.

Therefore it had no choice. It had to drag in the RIAA.

Our guess is that the conversation went something like this…..

Now look here RIAA….

Our economy is going to go belly up unless you can convince the world to stop using P2P.

How can we compete against the whole world unless we can read their confidential business plans.

We’ve fixed Microsoft windows – but we just cant get into that open source Linux stuff.

You guys created this mess by suing Napster – now fix it.

And you cant tell them that its because we cant read their emails to each other – you have to come up with another reason.

For countries to continue to kowtow to the United States demands of criminalising intellectual property sharing, they must demand that echelon data be freely shared with all signatories to the Berne convention.

And if the US really is more concerned with illegal file sharing than it is in snooping on the worlds population - then it will off course immediately comply.

In other words - the USA should have to first clean up in its own backyard before it can justify its pontifically "superior than thou" attitude, to foreign Governments.

The first thing to remember is that friends don’t spy on friends.

Wake up world – smell the coffee – The USA stance on Intellectual Property protection is “Do as I say – not as I do”.

Does anyone else see a problem with this? Or am I all alone on this little island.