Metadata may be an afterthought when it comes to most people's digital music collections, but when it comes to finding, buying, selling, rating, sharing, or describing music, little matters more. Metadata defines how we interact and talk about music—from discreet bits like titles, styles, artists, genres to its broader context and history. Metadata builds communities and industries, from the local fan base to the online social network. Its value is immense. But who owns it? Some sources are open, peer-produced and free. Others are proprietary and come with a hefty fee. And who determines its accuracy? From CDDB to MusicBrainz and Music Genome Project to AllMusic, our panel will explore the importance of metadata and information about music from three angles. First, production, where we'll talk about the quality and accuracy of peer-produced sources for metatdata and music information, like MusicBrainz and Wikipedia, versus proprietary sources, like CDDB. Second, we'll look at the social importance of music data, like how we use it to discuss music and how we tag it to enhance music description and discovery. Finally, we'll look at some legal issues, specifically how patent, copyright, and click-through agreements affect portability and ownership of data and how metadata plays into or out of the battles over "walled garden" systems like Facebook and Apple's iEmpire. We'll also play a meta-game with metadata during the panel to demonstrate how it works and why it is important.
Jason M. Schultz is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Before that, he was a Senior Staff Attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading digital rights groups in the world.
At EFF, Jason handled numerous high-profile intellectual property and technology matters affecting the public’s interests in free expression, fair use, and innovation with an emphasis on issues of copyright law, reverse engineering, digital rights management, and patent law reform.
Born and raised in eastern rural Pennsylvania, Jess Hemerly has resided in the Bay Area for the last seven years. A former research editor and manager at Palo Alto's Institute for the Future, Jess is currently a second-year master's student at UC Berkeley's School of Information. As a freelance writer and cultural critic, Jess's writing has appeared in MAKE, The Onion, 7x7, and on Boing Boing, AlterNet, and several local music blogs. In 2009, Jess was nominated for a Webby award in the "Website: Weird" category for a blog she co-created, Sad Guys on Trading Floors. She has served as an intern in President Clinton's post-presidential office in Harlem. Jess blogs regularly for 7x7 and will receive her Master's in Information Management and Systems in May.
Larisa Kingston Mann is a legal anthropologist, public speaker and
award-winning dj. A PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at BerkeleyLaw, she does ethnographic research on copyright law and local
creative practices, focusing especially on Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. Also known as DJ Ripley, she has also toured 19 countries across 3 continents over the past 14 years, and is a founding member of the San-Francisco-based Surya Dub event production & performing group. Larisa has also given talks and workshops on law, technology, copyright, creativity and community, from Jackson, Mississippi
to Lujbljana to Montreal to Brisbane.
