Idea Lawyer Blog

Stanford attracted a full house at the "free to the public thanks to the generous support of GOOGLE" Legal Futures conference Saturday March 8, 2008. It followed an all day "invitation" session and one could detect that more than a few participants referred to Friday and continued discussions to which most of the "public" (read: not invited to Friday) were not privy.
The weather: delicious!!!
The food: yummy (see photo post below) The seating: ergonomic The discourse: temperate as the weather

The first "Foo session" after the oft imitated, never duplicated O'Reilly Foo Camp

The Future of Professionally Created Content. OR
Critical Thinking and Learning to Triangulate from various sources of questionable veracity.
The Honorable Alex Kozinski primed the discussion by posing where will the objective (read "professional") news gathering come from now that the 60 feet on the ground in Bagdad are not paid for by the NYT. Although largely limited to the predictable gab about cost of distribution of mass consumed content (a la Lord of the Rings thanks to Cappucio of Time Warner) some panelists did go a bit deeper. Lessig tossed out Sandler's Foundation: journalism in the public interest. Microsoft Assoc. GC Tom Rubin dubbed the internet "short form creativity".
UC Berkeley prof and Google Chief economist Hal Varian quipped that folks pay to support a NY Yankee but not a NY Times Reporter and hey, that's just the market.
How can you get your news (pudding) if you don't read the paper (eat yer meat- apologies Pink Floyd)

Allusions were made to the age of NY Times readership (54) and the source of news to the YouTube generation: The Daily Show.

On truthfulness: my scribbles lead me to ascribe Cappucio with a story of news in cold war Russia, where a reader assumes everybody is lying and therefore the reader "triangulates" from a variety of "untrustworthy" sources to figure out the truth.
So is the moral of the story, don't believe everything you see on YouTube and the Daily Show?

Noteworthy:
Paul Cappucio, General Counsel of Time Warner said the music industry is doing FINE. !?!!?

Larry Lessig seemed intent on brawling with ALEX KEEN (whose business card dubs himself "the antichrist of silicon valley") on matters in Keen's book, "The Cult of the Amateur: how today's internet is killing our culture." Foo Session or not, participants deserve to be let in on what took the appearance of a domestic squabble, with most of the action offstage.

For a different take, see:
Valley Zen coverage of Professional versus Amateur Content