The U.S. government is becoming more willing to push the agenda of Hollywood and the music industry internationally, according to recent media reports.

The May raid on the Swedish torrent site, ThePirateBay.org, is only the most overt action recently taken by the U.S. government on behalf of content owners. The U.S. also appears to be pushing an international treaty that would give broadcasters additional--and unnecessary, argues Duke Law School professor James Boyle--intellectual property rights on any transmitted content. The Bush Administration has offered to do even more, according to an article in the Washington Post.

Yet, the actions by the U.S. government and the content industry has produced a popular backlash, with demonstrations in Sweden and calls by some legislators to repeal hard-line copyright laws.

The debate over where legislators should draw the line between legal protections of copyrighted material and the benefits of public access to content was once an obscure topic, but is rapidly becoming a major consumer issue as the music and movie industries strike closer and closer to home. For example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the reverse engineering of content-security measures except in narrow exceptions and provides the rules for takedown notices, has been widely abused by technology companies to attempt to block competitors and by content companies to inundate Web sites with automatically generated takedown notices.

This week, ThePirateBay.org reopened in Sweden after a brief period operating from The Netherlands. While the site's administrators have been hard to reach for comment, that doesn't mean they are without opinion. Pinging the domain readily brings up the group's opinion of the MPAA and the Swedish content coalition, the APB:

$> ping thepiratebay.org
PING thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hey.mpaa.and.apb.bite.my.shiny.metal.a**.thepiratebay.org (83.140.176.146): icmp_seq=1 ttl=45 time=134 ms