|
| |
|
|
| |
|
| |
Description
The Lineup:
Online entrepreneurs Drew Curtis (Fark.com), Erik Martin (Reddit), and Ken Fisher (ArsTechnica) discuss intellectual property and fair use online; moderated by fellow entrepreneur Rob Reid (Listen.com/Rhapsody) whose new novel, Year Zero, considers these issues on an intergalactic level (seriously). Complimentary wine will be served.
Rob Reid is an author and a tech entrepreneur, and will be the evening’s moderator. He has written for periodicals as diverse as Wired and the Wall Street Journal, as well as for innumerable online publications. His new novel,Year Zero, is a comedic tale set largely in present-day New York City. It considers a vast advanced alien civilization that’s so into human pop music that it accidentally commits the biggest copyright infringement since the Big Bang—thereby bankrupting the entire universe. While obviously playful in nature, the novel also seriously considers the explosive issue of copyright in the digital age. Rob will briefly reprise a popular TED talk that he recently gave on this subject, and moderate the panel. Erik Martin is the General Manager for the social news community reddit.com, and has been with the site since 2008. In 2012, TIME magazine named him to their list of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World”. Prior to joining reddit, Erik advised a wide range of film, music, TV, and web video companies on digital strategy, including a role as Head of Digital for the independent film/music label Palm Pictures. Before his internet addiction fully took hold, he worked as a documentary filmmaker, and was a senior agent and videographer for the public pranksters Improv Everywhere.
Ken Fisher is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. Now owned by Conde Nast, Ars Technica is the world’s most widely-read technology news site, with roughly ten million unique monthly readers. Ken has also done years of PhD-level research at Harvard into the religions and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. This has involved archaeological and archival work in Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Israel—much of it in the Coptic language or in ancient Greek.
Ken will weave his two radically different areas of expertise together in a lively discussion of “5,000 years of user-generated content.” He will argue that most of written history is one of combination & recombination, of exegesis & synergesis. It’s only when we enter the pre-modern era and the rise of capitalism that the lone “author” is born—and with that, an entirely new approach to expression. In light of this, the rise of collaborative works like Wikipedia and the Linux operating system represent returns to an ancient system of creation – rather than the rise of a new one.
As the proprietor and editor-in-chief of Fark.com, Drew Curtis is in a very unique position where digital media is concerned. For the past 13 years, he has watched as media evolved from an industry that eschewed and dismissed the digital realm to an industry very much aware that their survival depends on it. With over 2,000 news items a day submitted by a pool of three million users, there’s very little that happens in the world that doesn’t pass across Drew’s desk, all thanks to the advances in digital media. And yet, without traditional journalism, there would be nothing to report.
Fark represents a new piece of the media consumption equation—curation. Fark deeply permeates the pop culture zeitgeist—in 2009 Fark was honored for the second time with its own category on Jeopardy. Drew Curtis runs Fark.com in Kentucky and owns 100% of the company. He has appeared on every major news outlet dozens of times each, and has done over 1,000 radio interviews to date. Fark.com is heavily watched by media outlets for story ideas, and as a result many of the eye-catching news stories of the week originate from there. Adding Drew to a panel discussion brings a wealth of knowledge of what’s currently trending on the Internet —and why. And he’s damn funny. Previous speaking engagements include TED 2012 (main conference), South By Southwest (2009, 2010, and 2011), multiple Poynter Institute symposiums, and Web 2.0 and social media conferences. Drew is also the author of It’s Not News It’s Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News, possibly the only book in existence reviewed by both Dave Barry and Stephen King. He is also currently enrolled in the prestigious Haas-Columbia Executive MBA program, class of 2013.
Drew will discuss Fark’s run-in with a patent troll—specifically, one that that had a patent “…for the creation and distribution of news releases via email“—something that his website did not actually do! Rather than cave into the troll’s demands, Drew braved crippling legal expenses and fought the troll to a standstill. He will conclude with a roadmap for how other patent troll victims can fight off these extortionate demands.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
