Comment by kmeisthax

> If one wants to try to set another floor, it involves every country in the WTO to agree on that.

This is less of a tough sell than you think. In pretty much every IP-related trade negotiation, you can divide the world into two categories:

* Ultra-rich countries that want to push through every insane IP idea they have (life+50, DMCA 1201, etc) onto as many other countries as possible

* Everyone else

Notably, the ultra rich are all "dealmaker countries". They're the ones dictating the terms of international trade to everyone else and whatever terms they insist upon will be accepted without question. So yeah, if, say, South Africa or India want shorter terms, they still have to respect America's terms, at least up to life+50. But if the US wants shorter terms out of India, they will get shorter terms out of India, come hell or high water.

Conversely, Mexico has life+100 terms, but nobody is trying to use them to ratchet up terms elsewhere. They're a deal taker.

The real question is if another ultra-rich country will stop one that tries to lower the Berne minimum. Keep in mind that the ultra-rich subdivide into groups that, in order of relative IP insanity, are: Europe, Japan, and then the US in the crazy slot. If the US were to, say, repeal DMCA 1201; Europe would cheer and Japan would grumble.

Actually, the Berne convention happened during a time when Europe was the copyright basketcase and America was in the "everyone else" category[0]. The US had 28+14 terms up until 1976, and we didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988 - almost a hundred years late[1]! So if the US were to drop the Berne floor, you could totally imagine the EU going insane and trying to trade war the US out of it. But at the same time, the EU isn't very good at fighting trade wars with other ultra-rich blocs. Or at the very least, they fold very easily.

[0] For exactly the same reason why China is today. China is in the same position America was a century ago, where it had a huge manufacturing base and basically no cares about copyright.

[1] In particular, the US really, really hated automatic registration. While it is true that you don't have to register copyright and users of creative works have to treat everything as copyrighted; creators still have to register anyway if they want to actually enforce their rights. And if they don't do it right away they don't get statutory damages, which are almost always the only damages that matter. So you get all the problems of automatic registration with all the problems of copyright formalities.