 and we're live at the MIT Media Lab. I'm Dazza Greenwood, a research scientist here in the Human Dynamics Group and starting the law.mit.edu research initiative with Sandy Pentland. And we're getting into lots of interesting legal questions and technology, lots of legal hacks, rapid prototypes and lots of student projects that involve the law, technology, innovation, and we have lots of student projects at the Media Lab. So I thought this should be a great time to have a conversation and to share with everybody this very, very special, I think novel and important and timely collaboration that we've got going now at MIT with B Law School that could be a tremendous help for legal questions that come up all the time for all projects. And perhaps ironically, including four projects that we're doing with law students and that involve legal issues. So it's especially relevant for us. And to talk about that, Andy Seller's friend and colleague from BU is, and who's heading up as a liaison, the program with us is here at the Media Lab to talk a little bit about that. So welcome, and I just wanted to ask, could you maybe let people know who you are and what is the program? Sure, be happy to. So I run the technology in Cyberlaw Clinic, which is a clinic that was created in partnership between MIT and Boston University School of Law. It runs like a lot of legal clinics do. We have law students working with us and we work with real clients on real issues. The students do the bulk of the work and I supervise and make sure things are going in the right direction and intervene as need be or surface more systemic issues that warrant a larger response. So we've been working now, we launched in September of 2016. We've been working for about two a year and a half now building this out. We've worked now with dozens of clients, student clients I should specify, we work specifically with students, currently enrolled students at either MIT or BU, or a team that has as one of their key members a student at either MIT or BU. So we've had a great opportunity to get to know a lot of different students around the MIT campus and what sort of legal issues they run into. And we help them directly with whatever they need, we advise them if there's a particular issue with what they're planning to do, or we will represent them if need be, if they get into trouble or if they wanna go on the offense eventually, one of the clients we're with right now is a client who asked for some records from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act weren't being given those records and so we're representing them in a lawsuit against the CIA to get those records out there. Hmm, yeah, offense or I guess defense of the Constitution. Sure. And like full application of law. That's right. Assuming that's how it turns out. I have something to run out. So that is interesting. So something that comes up for me a lot here in the media lab and with our collaborators, when we do hackathons or what I call prototype jams and all these rapid development surets that we do is what is the right time to start to engage counsel? It can be a bit heavy and even could, I've found chill innovation if you kinda lawyer things up too early when people just brainstorming. Yeah. And if you go too far, there's some point after which important questions arise about are we in a partnership together? Are we commercializing this? Do we all agree on what we're doing? Sure. Whose project it is? Is it MIT's project? Is it the Sloan Persons or the Media Lab or the Harvard or some innovator that's sitting in on the meetings and it can become a tangled mess quickly. But what do you think is the sweet spot for when students would best engage with the clinic? Yeah, it's a very hard question. We try and be very responsive to the environment of innovation that students are used to. So we're used to having clients approach us when things are a little underbaked, a little in-co-it, kinda going in a few different directions and aren't really sure what they wanna do yet. We actually really like working with clients at that stage because oftentimes when it comes to law, a little pivot here or there can avoid a huge issue for a client down the road. Now, I recognize that that's not true of many other lawyers. A lot of lawyers get this connotation, sometimes earned of just being able to say no, that's too risky or here's the risk and shut it down, shut it down. We try to be not like that. We try and be helpful. We try and work with the client to figure out the right way to get to where they want to go. Nice. And so what I usually tell clients or prospective clients is whenever their spidey sense is kinda tingling that there might be a legal question here, that's a fine time to reach out to us and just ask a question. Sometimes the answer will be very quick, like nope, no issues yet, but if you start going down this way, contact us again or be sensitive towards this but otherwise go ahead. So we're happy to field questions like that as they come up. Times when things usually come to a head are usually when you've got a launch coming up or you're demoing something, you're throwing up a website, you're doing sort of the launch piece at a hackathon that could be the Sunday of a hackathon weekend or it could mean a couple of weeks later as things continue to build up. If you're using someone else's stuff without asking their permission, so that's sort of like the nice way to say intellectual property questions. Ding, ding, ding. Yeah, that's a good time to raise us. Or if you know that what you're gonna publish or share is going to annoy someone or get someone offended or upset or think that their business or resources are at risk, that's a good time to reach out to us too. That doesn't mean you can't do it. In fact, that's often what research is, but that's a time when you just want to make sure that everything's aligned up well and you're not exposing yourself to risk that you shouldn't be undertaking the project. Got it. So really it's like when you first start wondering yourself, geez, is there a question here or is there something about some conversation or some clarification about your ownership or risk? That's a good time to do it. Yeah, that's a great time to reach out. So can I ask you a sort of improv question? Sure, let's hear it. So here's like a hack that I've always wanted to do at the Media Lab and with legal hackathons in particular, which is, I almost feel like we owe a slightly higher duty to have things wired really tight for legal hackathons on the rules and the IP and all of the legal overlay. And so one thought that I had to try to with the Vanderbilt Law School hackathon, we've got to try it again with some others, is maybe we can do an October 30th, we'll mention that before we close, would be as part of the sign up on Eventbrite or however people sign up, Sketch.org, some terms and additions that maybe lay a framework so that people have a starting point or default position with respect to maybe intellectual property, whether it's open source or not. And what the meaning of a team and a team project is, whether it's maybe presumptively a partnership or presumptively absolutely nothing, but some voluntary association, everyone goes their own separate ways until open source would be my typical path. And then if you chose to perfect that into a startup or a collaboration or something, then everyone would in theory, in that case know, that would mean take another step even give them some templates of things to think about. Have you ever heard of or what do you think about the possibility of trying to provide rails in a sense or events where lots of projects will be made to maybe without over-lawing or provide some sort of default guidance and maybe trigger points to avoid anomalous results or confusion or conflict, but also maybe to promote innovation in a good way? Yeah, so two thoughts immediately jumped in on me. One is that I think this is a really good idea to help stave off any conflict in the future because if everyone has a clear understanding of what the expectations are, that tends to be a means that it will have less conflict going forward. So if everyone participating understands, here's how things, here's how ownership breaks down, here's what obligations I have to license things out. Irrespective of what you decide for those terms, if everyone's on the same page, you're not gonna get blindsided by something you're not gonna have an unanticipated consequence. That's usually the time when people get more angry and turn to lawyers to try and sort things out. So that's one piece for sure. There are a lot of things to unpack in that situation. You flagged a few sort of who would own what comes out of this project is one, what obligations they're making and to whom I guess to the organizer to put it out under some open license or put out the content in some way that is out for people to use because whenever you have an open license, you have an underlying owner of the IP and that owner is putting it out under these open terms. So, there is an owner of GPL license code and that's the person who speaks here if you wanna do something that's not under the scope of the GPL license, for example. And so that's good too. And the other thing that comes up a lot, it varies hackathon to hackathon but if you're giving the participants access to some data, a corpus of information, if you're doing a hackathon around a group of content then you just need to specify what rights do you have with that content. This comes up a lot with corporate hackathons where they'll say like improve our algorithm and here's a bunch of data. Sometimes it's not really in the corporation's interest to tell you exactly what rights you have with that data. So getting that, again, back to my first point, getting that in writing, you're getting that clear at the outset helps the participants understand what their obligations are. But a hackathon is a very interesting space for lawyers because things are moving so fast there's a lot of sort of breaking and designing and breaking going on that the product will pivot by the hour of the weekend. And then it often ends in a very public demonstration. I think for the lawyers who focus more on patenting that's the part that really freaks them out because that is probably a public disclosure of an invention under patent law triggering a clock in the United States for you to get your patents filed. That first disclosure is a very important moment in the life of a patent. And it usually happens again, a day or two after the invention. So getting an understanding of who owns what then is really important because then you'll have to decide, okay, who's actually gonna take the, is this patentable, should we patent it and what are the steps we're gonna take to that? Right, so many good things there. Thanks for the free legal advice. I know that the program's really designed for students but I feel like you hooked me up as a scientist a little bit there and maybe it's something we can work on together sometime. If you're at BU Law School and media lab hackathon and maybe give, I don't know, some read me or something with a contributor license as part of what I was thinking when you were saying clarifying who owns the underlying code and who owns new things. API's come up a lot. I really like Thomson Writers Labs, not endorsement but it's a factually true statement. And they've got a ton of APIs which would be interesting to run a hackathon on when you start looking at the APIs and the data directly trigger questions of where the lines are for, I guess ownership and derivative works and things like that. So be interesting, maybe we can make a little bit of progress there. Sure, that'd be great. Speaking of progress, how can people learn more about the program and then when are good opportunities to connect with you? Yeah, so whenever people wanna reach out, they can contact us, they can visit our website that's easiest place to visit. That's sites, S-I-T-E-S dot B-U dot E-B-U slash T-C-L-C, technology cyber law clinic. And that has an online intake questionnaire where people, if they want to contact the clinic and fill out that information there and also has my email address and my PGP key, if you'd rather send a secure communication to me, that's fine. It also has, you know, F-A-Q-E-S. Use it, best practice. It's a good practice, yep. And then it has F-A-Qs about how we operate. It has a little bit of information about students in the clinic as well as some of the clients we work with, not very many, because most of our clients want to get the advice confidentially and don't really want to share that they got advice from us. And so the couple of clients who shared publicly we talked about, we also post information about events we're hosting and talks we give. We do an IEP class every January. We do like a technology know your rights class. Usually two days in January, we'll kind of do a quick walkthrough. My students will take the lead and they do presentations on various legal topics that students frequently run into. And you know, here's copyright law and here's how you might confront copyright law and here's how you avoid issues. Here's the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and here's when you might run into the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and here's how you get around those issues. So that's a lot of fun too. I'll be sharing dates with that soon. And then we're also on Twitter, just mainly posting when we're gonna be around campus so you can ask us questions too. Twitter handle? Text Cyber Law, all in one word, is us. Full handle? Yeah, it's not too bad. It was launched in 2016 so a lot of the namespace was gone by the time we appeared. And then every Friday we're on campus, we kind of rotate through different locations on campus from 10 to five. So we'll very often be in the Media Lab here. We'll be over at the Martin Trust Center for my team of entrepreneurship. We'll be at the Student Center and we kind of poke around, we've been at the library, we've been at Beaver Works which is the Lincoln Labs Fab Labs facility. And we kind of kick around a few other places as well. Outstanding. So one of the references there was IAP which is Independent Activity Period. It's our month of January where we have lots of innovative classes, no formal classes at MIT. So that sounds like a great one. And coming up, I happen to know on Good Authority that you can chat with Andy at the MIT Legal Forum on AI and Blockchain on October 30th and 31st at the Media Lab. And you can find out more about that at mitlegalforum.org. And hopefully we'll have lots of innovative people from law and clients and law schools and vendors in the legal innovation space together to think even more deeply about ways that all of us involved in helping transition the law so it's usable for a digital age and for information-rich activities can advance our game. And that's gonna be something that's open for lots of folks like us who are practitioners and also students and people trying to get into it in the profession. So thank you very much. You're very welcome. Thank you. Couldn't be more delighted that you're doing this and that we're doing it together between law school and MIT. Yeah, it's been a great partnership. Let's make the most of it. Absolutely.