Obama surrenders to Big Content
The President of the French-backed terrorist government of the former British colony of Virginia has turned over the control of his country's judiciary to the entertainment industry. — In an unusual move, by any country's standards …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechEye's piece is satire, but it lands on a real arc: the three-strikes-style crackdown France proposed back in November 2007 made state-enforced copyright the template, and by April 2009 p2pnet was already documenting an upsurge in anti-P2P actions under the Obama administration. The column pushes that trajectory to its absurdist limit — recasting the US government as a vassal of "Big Content" with the judiciary handed over, complete with a fictional French-backed "former British colony of Virginia" framing.
The satire matters because it names the fear circulating among file-sharing advocates at the time: that enforcement had stopped being a legal dispute between rights-holders and infringers and become a matter of state policy shaped by the entertainment industry. With no syndicated pickups and no recorded discussion threads, the reaction layer here is thin — this reads as a single outlet's editorial jab rather than a story that travelled.
First-order effects
- Rights-holders gain a friendlier enforcement environment under the administration whose anti-P2P activity p2pnet already flagged in 2009, while file-sharing users bear the direct cost of escalated pursuit and takedowns.
- TechEye's audience — the same readership Computerworld's bloggers courted with the 2008 "turn the federal government over to bloggers" argument — gets confirmation that copyright policy is now a legitimacy battleground, not a niche licensing question.
Second-order effects
- ISPs and intermediaries are pulled toward the French graduated-response model, where cutting off "persistent" infringers shifts enforcement costs from rights-holders onto network operators.
- Consumer-tech and free-culture constituencies respond by politicizing copyright appointments and enforcement budgets, turning each anti-P2P action into evidence for the capture narrative the column exaggerates.
Third-order effects
- If US practice keeps converging on the French template, copyright enforcement structurally migrates from courtroom litigation toward infrastructure-level controls — a shift that would entrench what the corpus now labels access-control regulation as the default regime on both sides of the Atlantic.
- A durable political fault line forms between content industries aligned with enforcement-first governments and the platform/user coalition, shaping which parties and regulators treat piracy as a criminal-justice issue versus a market-pricing problem.
The trend: State-enforced copyright is spreading from France's proposed subscriber-disconnection model toward US administrative enforcement, moving infringement disputes off lawyers' desks and into government policy.