IP in Iraq

April 21st, 2003 | by aobaoill |

A bit late this – I had noted the story, but put it on the back burner.
Michael Croft of Blogcritics has noted that Hilary Rosen of RIAA may be drafting new legislation IP for Iraq.
The story seems to originate with a Greg Palast report on Democracy Now (wish I’d thought to ask someone to raise it at Palast’s meeting in Galway yesterday). If true, it’s wrong on so many levels. First, concept that industry people should draft legislation. But second, and more fundamentally, the idea that the so-called ‘interim administration’ should be putting anything other than minimal temporary regulations in place (or has the authority to do so).
OK, so we all know that the US will ensure that only a sufficiantly loyal regime takes over from them, but wouldn’t you think they’d at least go through the motions of pretending to let the Iraqis design their own system?
On a side-note, the comments to the story give an interesting, if limited, example of distributed investigative reporting – each person digging up a link or emailing a relevant party and reporting results. Of course the fact that the story sees the intersection of two pet blogging topics (IP law and ‘the war’) encourages this participation, and the amount of output (in terms of responses) isn’t very encouraging, but it may be a start.

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