The Most Amazing Day

When I got up this morning, I had a plan.  By 9:30am, that plan had been chucked out the window.  Why?  Well, this was in my inbox as part of the weekly school announcements:

ESLS, TELP, and the International Law Society present Mark Schultz and Alec van Gelder: "International Intellectual Property Development and the World Intellectual Property Organization"
Monday, March 23  |  12:00pm - 1:00pm  |  Moore Room
Mr. Schultz and Mr. van Gelder will be in Nashville for the Leadership Music Digital Summit, and they have kindly agreed to come to Vanderbilt Law to discuss their recently published paper, "Nashville in Africa," which discusses similarities between Nashville's music industry and currently developing creative industries in Africa.  Their talk will focus more generally on international intellectual property development.  Pizza will be served.

 

By noon, I had received several emails, including one from one of my favorite professors, making sure I had heard about the event.   Guess people know me!  Mzzzz Jones even asked if I set up the panel (that they'll be on at the Leadership Music Digital Summit).

Their paper had somehow come to my attention while I was in Nigeria, so it was saved on my computer, though I hadn't yet had a chance to read it.  Perfect time to have Adobe read it to me! (while I scrapbooked.  I am of the multi-tasking generation.)  It was very interesting.  My favorite part: Mondo Music and the large sections of the paper devoted to the Zambian music industry.  Yes, that's right, I said Zambian.  You don't happen to know anyone who knows anything about Zambian music do you?  Yeah, me neither.  ;)

So I walked up to school for the noon event.  I was sitting in the hallway, waiting for the 1Ls to empty out of our meeting room (their class room), when who should walk up, but the speakers themselves!  The student escort left them there, room still occupied by 1Ls.  It didn't take too long, we were soon all talking about about Africa and copyright.  Then my professor walked up, he knew one of the guys already and mentioned to them that he had just emailed me about their event.

Sitting in the hall, talking with the three of them, it was so neat!  I mean to just be able to sit and talk to people about the stuff I care about, wow.  Cuz really now, how many people do you know that will sit down and talk about Zambian music, the Nigerian Copyright Commission and African copyright laws with me?  Sure, sure, you all humor me (and I appreciate it!) but do you really want to talk about it?  Didn't think so.

They're speaking again at that conference tomorrow.  One of my Twitter friends gave me all the info about the conference.  (He goes to Belmont, it's at Belmont.)  I'm heading over tomorrow morning for a nice day of music, tech and IP issues.  The founder of Pandora will be there, too - could be helpful for my paper on Pandora and int'l licensing, if I can miss class.   We'll see.

What a great day!  Now I have to try to go to sleep.