Sutros

Tim and I attended two really terrific events this week where we got to hear from the good people from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons and many other representatives from our favorite music and technology organizations.

The first event was the SanFran MusicTech Summit, which took place this past Thursday. Believe it or not, our favorite panelists were the various lawyers on hand—including Zahavah Levine, the Head Counsel at YouTube, intellectual property guru Andrew P. Bridges and Fred von Lohmann from EFF. They seemed to best convey the absurdity of the current situation in the music business—where even the good guys, the ones who want to pay their proper dues to artists in exchange for hearing their music, cannot possibly do so legally online without putting out a massive effort or paying in to the old powers that be.

And generally, as Tim pointed out, there was very little talk about getting attribution and payment back to the artists themselves. Nearly all of the talk was about major record labels, corporate rights holders and the online sharing platforms that have brokered deals with them. We wished that we could have heard more about the musical “middle class,” those of us out there who are less concerned about big business, and care more about sharing our music with friends, family and anyone else who wants to hear it. You know, Sutros-type musicians.

Jonathan Zittrain hailed just such regular Web crawlers last night at a lecture hosted by Stanford Law School, EFF and CC. Mr. Zittrain’s book, The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It, actually starts out with a history of the Internet, which is full of geeks, goodwill and Hitler cats, and goes on to explain how all this has morphed into a potentially very scary future. He calls upon all of us to develop technologies and online communities that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively on solutions for the future.

Seems like a good time for Sutros.