EFF Music Share-in 9/14

San Francisco - Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation and five Bay Area bands for an afternoon of live music and outdoor fun at EFF's second annual Share In. The festival will be held in Golden Gate Park's Music Concourse Bandshell on Saturday, September 14th from noon - 5pm. The celebration of independent music will be hosted by Grateful Dead lyricist and EFF co- founder John Perry Barlow, and former wife of the late great Jerry Garcia, Mountain Girl Garcia.

Artists participating in this event will permit recording of their performances by those in attendance in support of EFFs Open Audio License (OAL). Musicians performing at the event include: the Box Set Duo - clown princes of folk-rock, the classic funk band Funkmonsters, celtic world-fusion group Hy Brassyl, harmony based folk-pop band Atticus Scout, and Berkeley-based party band Shady Lady.

In addition to music, the Share-In will feature performers including Ashley Foster the One Wheeled Wonder, the Existential Circus, Frantastic Hands, the Metronome Dancers, and Willy Bologna and his Sideshow Circus. Bring your family and friends!

Ben and Jerry's will sell their famous ice cream, and Cartwheel Catering will be on site with hot dogs, pretzels, and churros.

Proceeds from the Share-In will go directly to EFF's Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression (CAFE), which oversees projects such as the Open Audio License. CAFE empowers the creative community in cyberspace by protecting the public's access to and use of audiovisual technologies.

The Open Audio License is a tool that EFF has developed in order to help artists share music more directly with their fans, without sacrificing recognition for their creativity. The OAL encourages collaboration, providing artists with an alternative to a business model strictly driven by profit. Based on the open source and free software initiatives for software development, the OAL encourages artists to share with one another and their fans

Adoption of the OAL does not mean that artists go unrewarded for their work. On the contrary, the OAL permits artists to share single tracks or performances and gain widespread recognition for their work without relying on intermediaries. EFF encourages new models of music distribution in the digital world that benefit the artists themselves. The Internet makes it possible to drastically reduce the overhead for packaging and distributing music, which is where record companies currently spend most of the money that could be going to artists. EFF is committed to developing tools that empower artists to take control over their own art and to be compensated appropriately for their works.