 And we're live! Hi, I'm Dazza Greenwood, a new co-chair of the New York Legal Hackers Group, and we're here to talk about and do a quick recap of our last event with Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackers for the New York City Node of the Open Music Legal Hackathon, a global distributed event series with Legal Hackers chapters around the world where we're looking at innovative solutions for musicians and composers using technology to break through some business barriers and other obstacles that have held everybody back in the past. And it was a terrific event, and I just wanted to ask Mark and Sydney from the co-convening groups to introduce yourselves and maybe we can do a quick wrap up. So you want to get us started, Mark? Sure. My name is Mark Potgwitz. I'm one of the organizers of New York Legal Hackers. For those of you unfamiliar with Legal Hackers as an entity, it is kind of a global movement of lawyers, technologists, policy folks looking to kind of hack the legal process and hack legal systems to create a better world for all of us. Different chapters have different areas of focus, but generally the idea is to figure out ways we can improve legal process government and government through the use of technology. Another thing that we do besides trying to fix the government is fix other systems in general. So recently we took a look at the music industry and how the music industry operates. And we tried to think about ways we could empower artists to have better control over what happens to their content when they create it and what rights they can have with respect to the content after it's out in the world. So with that we partnered with Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackers and some other groups including the Open Music Initiative and DASA will talk about this more in a few minutes. So with that I'm going to kind of nod off and hand it over to Sydney to explain her role with Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackers and her role in this event. Hi guys, my name is Sydney Abouali. I am one of the co-organizers for this event that we had this past Saturday, the New York Node of the Open Media Hackathon. I am also one of the co-founders and co-organizers of the Brooklyn Law School chapter of Legal Hackers. This is a new found club just last year and to my knowledge it's one of the first if not the first Legal Hackers student organizations internationally. There we really do encourage our students to question how today's most exciting technologies are impacting the legal profession and how to interact with these technologies as a lawyer. Even if you don't have a technical background it's really important to harness these skills and then we also learn to acquire skills to present your own kind of novel legal tech solution at the innovators competition which we host in the spring. So my involvement with the Open Music Hackathon it was when I met DASA over at the Legal Hackers Summit this past August which was a really exciting event with all the Legal Hackers organizers and he had this vision of how to bring together artists, technologists, content creators and lawyers and kind of think about these questions about autostartonomy and the control over digital assets and just their rights and maintaining ownership over your content in this new space and I have a bit of background over in the artist's book and relations world. I worked in the festival industry for a few years so this was totally right up my alley. Some of the interest came from also coordinating past events so I wanted to get involved in any way I could and bring Brooklyn Law School Legal Hackers into this mission as well so it was a fantastic event. It was just fabulous to be able to collaborate with you and the other students that came, Professor Jonathan Askin from Brooklyn Law School. So Brooklyn Law School was humongous contributor to just the whole event making it good. So we promised to recap, here comes a recap. So I'd say like the main course of the event was our keynote speaker and a nice facilitated dialogue we had with him. Jesse Kaye is how he likes to be known. He's in charge of the new agency and they are truly a pioneer in the area of the sector of music and deploying new technologies in creative ways to make music available in different kinds of business models and creative legal frameworks and again using just very innovative technology. So he kind of gave us a rundown I would say of what is the basic context in the industry today and some background on what the key drivers and inhibitors have been in years past and new opportunities now with emerging technologies like blockchain and what's going on with AI driven data driven model based systems that can in a more automated way and with less friction and coordination cost allow direct connection between artists and audience and some innovative business models about how people could do that which by the way all of you folks in the other nodes around the world this coming weekend should give a listen to that part because it's terrific fodder for the kinds of projects you could hack or the kinds of small discussion groups that in small discussion groups the sorts of topics you could anchor your discussions in. So that was terrific. Also it was very interesting where we had it. Can you maybe speak a little bit about the space itself Sydney? Absolutely yeah so the Bushwick Generator you know this is a brand new space coming out of Bushwick in Brooklyn. So we want to give EmRick our host our sponsor you know a really huge thank you. What a fantastic guy this was the opportunity for us to be for my introduction to this space really and I think a lot of the participants as well. So basically what they're trying to do is create Bushwick to be a hub for really a lot of innovative spaces and thinkers and you know just in tech and beyond a lot of the creative content space as well. So they're really taking this model I'm pretty sure that right now it's kind of just a co-working space but you know they're also hosting a lot of other community events. They'll be hosting Brooklyn Tech Week in a few weeks which is really exciting. They're really just adding value to the community and they're making it more of a sustainable effort by harnessing some of these relationships with their new found group the Bushwick Blockchain Alliance which seems to connect a lot of these interesting blockchain ventures coming around in Brooklyn and introducing the community to a lot of their goals as well which it seems like a lot of these seem to focus on social responsibility and how do we you know connect our communities with the larger interesting efforts that are going on you know economically and environmentally politically and yeah it's just it was a fantastic introduction to me for the space and I know everybody else as well. So for those of you that may not know Bushwick is a neighborhood of the BK of Brooklyn and this very much was a it was the New York City node but this was you know out by and in many ways for this fabulous community of Brooklyn just bubbling over with technology innovation and cultural you know cultural you know expression through music and that was a big that was a big part of it. I'll just mention quickly a through line between the San Francisco node with Beth McCarthy in particular and her mechanism design research group and the topics that Emrick kind of brought forward and that we talked about and hacked on a little bit was how to make co-working and collaborative maker type spaces that are truly part of a community and allow a way for people you know not that so much like the we work model or even the CIC model where we come and work and we're near each other physically and we go home but everything's quite isolated on the content level is there a way that some projects could help to generate revenue for the space and is there a way that some of that revenue and other benefits could be allocated back to the creators and to other people that are helpers like who's who's minding the gallery on Saturday you know who's promoting a performance who's curating like in San Francisco they had this fabulous wall with this very innovative art that showed the difference between centralized networks decentralized networks and you know truly distributed networks and yeah yeah yeah very cool really interesting stuff and so it was a part of it as well one other one other thing I think we remiss not to mention it we found a great formula with people bringing their puppies and dogs because it's hard to go home on a weekend and walk the dog we checked with emmerich the proprietor of the bushwick generator space he said it's fine if people you know can control their dogs and take responsibility for them nothing happens so we had a couple of terrific dogs we had Jonathan Askin professor from brick and law school brought rena who is a major part of you know all of his speaking of engagements in his classes do I think and and the network and then we also have Anjali from Monax a legal engineer who is a major contributor to the event and she brought little pebbles and boy those dogs just made the whole event so great so if you're organizers of legal hackers events and out there in the world and just for us in New York we should seriously think about making dogs a regular feature of our events absolutely look out for the open puppy hack in 2019 actually from hacking puppies in some way but by all means I think we kind of had that combination I think we definitely figured out that uh that equation right there so yeah it was so if you want to learn more about what happened in New York go to legal hackathon org and we've actually got the entire conversation that facilitated well the keynote and the discussion afterwards which was some really rich and creative and we've got some great feedback from people at Berkeley College of Music and from some other people that are looking forward to the events this coming weekend who have said that it was a terrific discussion so I you know want to just commend it to all of you you can basically be there time shifted and asynchronous though it may be we had multiple cameras and a lavalier did the whole thing on our phone and iPad so you can do that kind of hack yourself I guess the last thing I'll say is this has been so successful I'm back in Boston this week and at the Media Lab getting ready for the Media Lab node this weekend and that we decided at MIT we're actually going to do a kind of capping course an open course in January that carries forward this open music and open media theme and the legal dimensions of it so we have a fairly long-standing you know several years January open course on law blockchain and AI and this year we'll have other teachers with me from Berkeley College of Music George Howard most importantly where we'll actually break down one or two of those days and do a deeper dive into music and into some of the hacks and the more nuanced legal issues carrying forward section 17 of the Copyright Act and the important provisions of the Music Modernization Act calling for a public accessible database and what some of the interoperability for that would look like and opportunities for a more automated licensing for smart legal contracts identity you know you name it so if you're interested in all of that we'll post that to legal hackathon.org and you can also sign up and register as just a member of the public it will be an open course online at law.mit.edu and if you're an MIT student or Harvard student or can cross register then it'll show up in your catalogs as well so you are invited to continue the conversation there and keep learning with us and hacking with us and building with us and that includes you Sydney so come up come to the Media Lab and meet the robots. I would love to next time I'm up there you know I will be I'll be present and I'll be hacking and you know that's what's gonna happen can't wait. Here here. Okay so thanks everybody I look forward to continuing to hack the law with you and until next time see you online.