march 16 continues...

there was a choice in afternoon panels - i dropped by first the online coommunity panel hosted by friend jon lebkowsky but some ebay professional was positing his site's sales booths as community locii - hard to swallow and more promotional than enlightening.

so i dodged out for the mp3 panel because i very much enjoy mp3s. that was a fun panel because the richie-cunningham-resembling head of mp3.com was at one end and at the other was a woman from lucent/a2b, a competing big industry digital music standard. they were arguing over mp3s viability and artists versus consumers rights, the fat of the record companies and the importance of security and intellectual property. between them, carl, adam powell, a jupiter communications cat and a austin attorney.

the discussion was lively and entertaining. the mp3.com guy was animated and scrappy - he would fight with and proclaim over anyone. he spoke clearly and was definitely entertaining. carl, my friend, a smart guy, he was mumbling a bit into a quieter microphone and didn't opt to say too much anyways (i arrived late too, so i hear i missed some steadman vitrol). adam would periodically bash everyone or just corporations claiming to potentially represent his band, truman peyote. the experts expurted, and the lucent woman i felt sorry for - holding her own against a panel of relative mp3 fans. i got really sympathetical and actually admired her tenacity and adherance to professional ignorance when the audience comprised whelmingly of audiophiles and open-source freaks lambasted her big-bands, big corporate, closed-standard, license all the way (hah hah hah) music standard designed to compete with something popular, free, sharable, fun and here. she seemed to believe that the record companies would only back [into] something that could be controlled, a secure music format with expiration dates and copying limits and the like.

i could only stand so much of this inane back and forth over record company greed and killing the mp3 standard before i had to share my users perspective:

i love mp3s because i can share them with my friends. because they are easy to make. because i can take a cd i've bought and rip a song and put it in a folder and play it with a hundred other random songs that never should have been played together in the same mix, at the flick of a few software switches. and i can make mp3s from tapes, of my friends bands, and then i can post them live to a web site and see that other folks otherwise out of range can have access to some cool funky shit. i can help other people hear and understand the ineffable beauty of art tatum. i can continue to be a dj. i can share music with people and it's too easy and if you make something fixed so we can't share it we will break it so that we can enjoy sweet sounds together. and we will go to concerts and buy rereleases and maybe t-shirts and definitely books.

and i was quite excited and gesticulating by the end of speaking vociferously something like that so that by the time was done a few folks offered me some agreement and had enjoyed hearing themselves reflected.

then some partys