I honestly don't understand why people keep comparing the culture of American cities and states to European ones. America is one giant country - the EU isn't. The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.
Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunctional as their European counterparts.
The first poster compares markets and laws, not cultures. The EU market is in dire need of a solution with similar effects as fair use, yet this tranche of amendments does very little to shift copyright into that direction; worse, with art. 13 it goes even further in the opposite direction.
Just the last sentence is wrong. The EU isn't a mess in terms of IT, it's merely irrelevant on the global consumer market.
> The cultural differences between Detroit and, say, San Francisco is miniscule compared to differences between London and Berlin.
As someone who's spent a significant amount of time in each of those cities and all around both the US and Europe, I can firmly state that this is _not_ true.
The cultural differences between European cities is vastly overrated. On the other hand, the differences across the US - particularly differences between urban metropolitan areas and everywhere else - are massively understated.
What about the cultural differences between London and rural Romania or Hungary? An even larger gap exists there than between SF and rural America, due to the very wide differences in macro national culture, national history and language.
Financially that's also true. The median income in Bulgaria is a few hundred dollars per month. The extreme variance between the countries at the top of the EU and the bottom, is far beyond anything you see in the US between states. There's an eight to ten fold GDP per capita gap between Bulgaria and countries like Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden. In the US, there's close to a two fold gap between Massachusetts or New York and West Virginia or Mississippi.
Not every city in America is San Francisco, Seattle, or Austin, but neither one state nor one city is as technologically dysfunctional as their European counterparts.