Anglo-American Gift Wars 2: The Return Visit

Remember the kerfuffle last month when Gordon Brown's highly symbolic, thoughtful gifts to the Obama family were reciprocated with 25 lousy DVDs? And how it turned out that those DVDs were most likely DRMed and therefore unwatchable in the UK? Well the Obamas decided to go one better on their return trip and offered up an iPod. To the Queen. Who, it turns out, already had one anyway.

Now I don't want to cast aspersions about the President of the United States, but according to this article the iPod contains video of the Queen's visit to Washington and Virginia, and the last time I checked (ie just a minute ago) the iTunes Store didn't sell videos of Royal visits. Which means that tech-savvy Obama must have put those videos on there himself- and this, while it doesn't rank up there with, say, invading another nation under false pretences, is possibly illegal.

I won't rail against the insanity of repressive copyright laws in our digital world here but I will say this- when even POTUS and the Queen are at it, everyone's a copyright criminal. Someone call the police- they're all still down at the Bank of England I think.