But legally buying a game in country (a) where backups are illegal, but the purchase of the game is not, and then taking it to your home country, (b) where they are not, and hence the game is not sold, and backing it up, would not be illegal, from a copying point of view.
If you ORDERED it from country (a) the seller may well be breaching his distribution rights, but if you went to country (a), bought it, and took it home, its ok.
Your analogy would work better if you bought the drugs in a country where it was not illegal to sell or possess them, only to smoke/eat/process them, (as magic mushrooms are in the UK) then took them home where it was legal to eat them and eat them.
What I ment, and perhaps was unclear about, was that if 'EA Games' decided copyright rules were too lax in the US and they were only going to sell their games in other countries, then although they would loose a ton of legitimate US users, the US citizens could just purchase them overseas (as EA couldnt make it illegal to own them in the US).
As such, even if the US tomorrow decided to drop all its copyright laws, there would be little point in the games companies completely boycotting the market, they would just need even nastier Copy Protection to try and make it simpler to just buy them