Sandy Pearlman, notorious producer and Professor at McGill University has gathered a great group of panelists for this SXSW session, including Peter Biddle, author of the widely read paper "The DarkNet and the Future of Content Distribution", Bryan Calhoun of SoundExchange, Eric Garland of BigChampagne, and Jonathan Zittrain of the Harvard Law School. Mike McGuire of Gartner Research will moderate.

Don't miss the fascinating discussion at SXSW Music:

The Cloud vs. the Paradise of Infinite Storage
Wednesday March 17th
12:30 PM - 1:30 PM
Room 15, Austin Convention Center

As our standard panel description format is a bit too short for Sandy's interesting proposal, we'd like to share it in its entirety, as follows:

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In Asymptopia, The Cloud vs. The Paradise of Infinite Storage:

Which one gets anybody paid for music, or, do they?

Two irresistible computer technology trend lines are about to collide. And, as usual, the fate of music, artists and intellectual property will be on the line. Ready or not, we are all about to enter the brave new reality of Asymptopia. Which version will it be? And will either one get anybody paid for music?

On the one hand, Cloud Computing: Most famously an initiative of Google, it's designed to migrate user's applications, processes and content off local computers and up to remote storage on the "cloud" of the Internet. Under this scenario, hard drives become cloud drives, software becomes cloudware, music would have no need to reside locally on anyone's computer and personal computers would have no earthly need to be as autonomously powerful as they've now become. After all, in the vastness of this indispensable (Meta) Internet, upon which everyone would become completely dependent, all that used to be local and private will be subsumed. Autonomy--and Anonymity--would be replaced by Terminality. Just like it was in the 70s and 80s before computers were grown insanely powerful enough to be autonomous. For the purposes of suppressing, through tracking and interdiction, any "illicit" traffic in music objects, this is the most powerful structure yet conceived.

And on the other, The Paradise of Infinite Storage: The inevitable consequence of Moore's law. What happens when the entire history of recorded music can be contained on a device the size of a guitar pick? And if that content is shared between users on private networks, where does that leave intellectual property? For some, this may sound like a sci-fi nightmare. In actuality it's an almost immediate reality. With the cost and physical size of storage quickly crashing to nearly zero, what does this mean for the ongoing attempts to monetize digital music? Personal computers have now grown so powerful and storage so vast, they have achieved virtual autonomy. On their own, these machines can store and retrieve all the music ever recorded in the history of the world. And once they've done that once, they won't need the Internet anymore. Decoupled from the Internet and coupling only with themselves, they can reproduce infinite music libraries like serial rabbits or private network interchange bunnies. Thanks to the marvels of perfect copies, one such digital infinite music library equals infinite digital music libraries. Now that these machines have become autonomous, somebody wants to stop the music and move everything to the Cloud. Good luck.
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Photo: Panelist Peter Biddle, courtesy of Scott Beale / Laughing Squid.