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IP: more more on European Law Seen As Grave Threat To E-Commerce
From: David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 11 Sep 1999 08:58:07 -0400
To: farber () cis upenn edu Subject: Re: IP: more on European Law Seen As Grave Threat To E-Commerce From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry () piermont com> Date: 11 Sep 1999 08:47:15 -0400 Lines: 48Of course, how to make a company operating "virtually" actually accountable is not clear. But to say that this direction is a threat to E Commerce is not correct. It is simply a prejudice for a company based in US whose main market is the US and other markets are marginals. It probably repreents an opportunityfor the others, as long as their business respect proper behaviour, and the law of the countries are sound.The problem with this statement is that even if the law of the countries in question is sound it would still be just plain impossible to comply with the laws of ALL of the countries in question. In the U.S., where we have fifty different sets of (similar) commercial law, one for each state, it was realized long ago that you could not have commerce function if the laws of all the states in which the participants of a multi-state transaction lived involved in a case. Typically, contracts specify the laws of ONE of the states involved, in order to create some assurance that everyone knows what set of laws will be invoked in a dispute and can attempt to comply with them even before a dispute occurs. If this is needed in a situation where the conflicting laws are very similar, imagine a situation in which one is vending to multiple countries with totally different commercial law traditions at the same time. I hate to make a near-prejudiced statement, but the nations of Europe and the EU have managed to produce an amazingly business-unfriendly environment with a thicket of irrational laws that conflict with virtually all reasonable legal and business practice. As a result, Europe has an unemployment rate that which the U.S. experienced in the 1970s -- indeed, in many countries, it is within a stone's throw of that which the U.S. experienced during the Great Depression. Only the state social welfare apparatus has kept these nations from experiencing intolerable pain under these circumstances. Even if our current economic prosperity here in the U.S. were to utterly disintegrate and our unemployment rate triple, we couldn't even match the rates in much of Europe. Before claiming any new idea from the European Commission might be a good idea, one must question whether or not the entire set of "good ideas" they've had for the last fifteen years have been, on balance, of benefit to the people of Europe. Sure, all these lovely laws about "consumer protection" and such sound lovely on paper, but in the end, all they seem to do is assure that people decide not to do business in Europe at all. Perry
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- IP: more more on European Law Seen As Grave Threat To E-Commerce David Farber (Sep 11)