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Things aren't helped by the fact that the interests of American business and American Government coincide at almost every level, and since the American economy is so huge, American law can effectively become law for the whole world. Take, for instance, the three NatWest bankers who are accused of defrauding as part of the Enron scandal. The three who worked for Greenwich NatWest are alleged to have told NatWest that a company called LJM was worth $1 million and to have then sold the asset to a subsidiary of Enron for $30 million. This is entirely a British affair as the only possibly losers are NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland and they have declined to prosecute the three former employees, however the Americans are extraditing them as part of the Enron prosecution.

I’m as happy as the next man to see three bankers get their comeuppance but the consequence is that anyone who works in the City of London must wonder when they too will hear a knock on the door.

Then we have American copyright laws. At the start of every DVD we sit through minutes of warnings that tell us it is illegal to circumvent the copy protection on a DVD, or to attempt to do so, and it is illegal to upload the content of a DVD to naughty file sharing types. Well yes it is illegal in the US but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is illegal in your territory – and quite frankly, why should I care about FCC violations? The last time I looked, the Federal government had no jurisdiction over UK citizens, but perhaps I’m wrong.

I wouldn’t like to have to defend myself against an accusation that I have illicit software or music on my PC as I would have to dig up literally hundreds of licences but at least I know that they all exist in some form somewhere. But we seem to be moving ever closer to a world where the citizens can be prosecuted by foreign courts over digital copyright infringement, regardless of the actual laws of that particular land.

Yes, the Internet is a global phenomenon, but surely that should mean that every country should govern its own citizens in regard to Internet use. Or maybe there should be an international governing body, made up of all the nations in the world – sound familiar? Of course that would only work if every country agreed to accept that governing body’s decisions, no matter how big or powerful they may be.

Last week I went to a garden centre and was surprised to see that some of the plants have a legal warning attached to a label. The herbaceous perennial Heuchera ‘Magic Wand’ has been genetically modified to make the leaves a different colour to other variants of Heuchara and the result is that you effectively sign a legal agreement when you buy the plant. You can do what you like with it, provided it is for personal use, but if you make any commercial gain then you owe money to the company that developed the genetic modification.

The idea of proving that every plant in the garden is legitimate and covered by an open source licence is nothing short of absurd. Perhaps the safe move is to burn my British passport and to apply for Swiss papers at once. The air is nice and clean in the Alps and the Swiss aren’t keen on extraditing their citizens.

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