Here’s an interesting confluence of personal interest and scholarly pursuit: the Russian music downloading site AllOfMP3.com, which provides extremely cheap downloads with no copyright protection, is apparently one of the — perhaps the only — major barrier to Russia joining the World Trade Organization. A site like AllOfMP3 would surely violate the TRIPs agreement on international recognition of intellectual property rules, and TRIPs is what I just wrote a whole paper on (though I focused on generic medication for poor countries, not music copyright).

This book learnin’ might come in handy after all…

[tags]allofmp3, wto, trips agreement, russia[/tags]