Also, the US uses trade treaties to cajole other countries into adopting very restrictive copyright doctrines. It's more common than you'd think.
However, I'm not aware of anywhere where copyright lasts longer than the US (except in special cases like Peter Pan[1], even if that is really just perpetual rights to royalties from performance[2]).
Edit: Just noticed that [2] says copyright in Mexico is actually longer than in the US, but I'm not aware of the specifics of how it works.
[1] http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/copyright/
[2] http://www.gosh.org/gen/peterpan/copyright/faq/#Copyright
Sure you are. Just not interested enough to Google the specific case that was helpfully referenced in the comment you replied to.
*And it was argued that the same result would have held in the UK.
That is exactly what you asked for: a specific example of US law being more lenient than the law in other countries.
For copyright specifically (not IP in general, and definitely not patents), the US is very soft.
For instance many mainland euro country have a concept of Author's Rights (or moral rights), which may well be perpetual, inalienable, unwaivable and unassignable (in a company, the moral rights belong to the employee who created the work, the company has an exclusive license to the economy rights of the work). In french law, moral rights provide 4 sub-rights:
* divulgation right, the author is sole holder of the right to decide the original disclosure of the work
* paternity right, respect must be given to the parental relation between the author and the work
* work respect right, the author can forbid any and all transformative work. This alone means "fair use" is much, much broader in the US than in France
* repent right, even after divulgation the author can "uncirculate" the work (although he may have to compensate license holders)
and because these moral rights are perpetual and inalienable, you can't put something in the public domain in France, you can only provide a universal license. The work will only fall in the public domain once copyright has expired.
There are also entire classes of IP protection which the US doesn't recognise but are common elsewhere, for example sui generis rights.
