Christopher Leger

International trade agreements rarely make front page news, and even then only when the agreements are signed, binding the signatory countries to them. Because of this, the standard practice for negotiating these trade agreements is extraordinarily opaque due to press disinterest and the lack of the same open-government laws that many nations have regulating how [...]

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Canadian copyright lobbyists seem to misunderstand the idea of intellectual integrity. They have done what countless lobbyists do – namely, hire an independent academic and expect that the expert will validate their argument. However, in this case, the expert did not report what the lobbyists wanted to hear, and they summarily replaced his report with [...]

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The fight for a voice at the table by anyone not already an IP rights-holder is heating up. Already, the Obama administration is filled with RIAA and BSA industry oriented officials, and few if any from consumer, education, or hardware oriented backgrounds. An April 2nd letter sent to the President requests a more diverse group [...]

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Copyright has absolutely nothing to do with any national security threats, and to suggest that it does undermines real national security issues as well as any faith in fair and open government. The Obama administration has continued the Bush administration policy of holding information regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trade treaty, outside of [...]

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This Week in Tech episode 183 is officially the best TWiT ever. The panel has a very rational and intellectually honest discussion on a wide range of intellectual property issues, and doesn’t contain any of the business-side, inside baseball, filler that Dvorak or Calicanis bring up. Honestly, it is the best hour and a half [...]

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Ars Technica alerted me to a very heartening story about a Harvard Law class defending a Boston University student against an RIAA filesharing lawsuit. These students are the future of the legal profession, and they themselves understand how technology can impact the law, regardless of the tactics the RIAA use in the future. The two [...]

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It looks like Comcast and AT&T are the first ISPs to fall to the coercive RIAA. The RIAA has finally realized that suing thousands of their customers is bad for business, and has decided to change their tactics. They now want to pay ISPs to be the cops of the internet, taking people offline who [...]

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With another Obama administration official coming straight from the Biden/RIAA wing of the Democratic party, it appears less and less likely that the Obama administration will be anywhere near as consumer friendly as even the Bush administration was. I think that the odds are better than average that we may look back at Kevin Martin’s [...]

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Slashdot has an interesting post about two lawsuits filed agaings EA for their DRM included on new games. If the only way to make companies act responsibly, then so be it. Hopefully the courts that hear these lawsuits can fully understand how onerous this DRM is to the law-abiding consumer.

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I link to Nine Inch Nails over there in the right column for a reason! Trent Reznor is constantly trying to come up with new and interesting ways of making money with his music online, and it seems he has come up with another winning system. The new NiN releases Ghosts I-IV are available in [...]

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