About two weeks ago I wrote about an interview with Greg Palast on Pacifica's Democracy Now! program wherein Palast claimed to be working on a story detailing how "RIAA Lobbyist Hilary Rosen" was writing the Intellectual Property Laws for the new democratic government of Iraq.

There was a good bit of discussion about it in the comments here and several of us tried to get more information from the RIAA, Rosen, Palast, or the BBC, mostly without success. Eric did get a response from Cary Sherman, which was, to date, the most concrete bit of information available.

Andrew Orlowski ran an article on the Palast/Democracy Now story in The Register and apparently also had much better luck getting Palast to respond to his requests for further information than I did.

Per the letters column on The Register, Palast responded to his inquiry thusly (scroll to the end for this response):

This story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Greg Palast tells us.

"Hilary Rosen was talking to Grover Nordquist [President of Americans for Tax Reform] at a social discussion, and she says 'I'm writing the copyright law', and Nordquist says 'And I'm writing the tax law'".

So, another step towards tracking this down. The WSJ charges for access and I'm not currently a member. Anyone want to step up and search on this in the WSJ archives?