This Week in Law 305 (Transcript)
Denise Howell: Next up on This Week in Law, I'm joined by Patrick Goold, Lisa Macklem, and Rebecca Williams. We're going to talk about how the TPP is not TP; in-game theft and real-live prosecution; hijacking Instagram; and much more, next on This Week in Law.
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Denise: This is TWIL, This Week in Law with Denise Howell and Sarah Pearson, episode 305, recorded May 29, 2015
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Hi, folks. I'm Denise Howell, and thank you so much for joining us for This Week in Law where we talk about everything that's happening at the intersection of technology and the law. We've got a great panel of folks with us this week. I can't wait to get into it; so let me introduce them to you, and we'll be on our way. Joining us from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he's an IP fellow, is Patrick Goold. Hello, Patrick.
Patrick Goold: Hi, Denise.
Denise: Great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Also joining us, where she is a graduate research assistant at the University of Western Ontario — and also a writer forspoiler.tv — is Lisa Macklem. Hello, Lisa.
Lisa Macklem: Hi, Denise.
Denise: Great to meet you. Thanks for joining us.
Lisa: My pleasure.
Denise: And joining us from Washington D.C., where she is one of the people who runs Legal Hackers there — the D.C. Legal Hackers — and she's also an open data advocate, or the open data advocate, for Data.gov — is Rebecca Williams. Hello, Rebecca.
Rebecca Williams: Hi, Denise.
Denise: Great to meet you, too. Okay. So I go back and forth, I think, from sentence to sentence whether I say "data [pronounced with short A]" or "data [pronounced with long A]." Which do you say?
Rebecca: Data [pronounced with long A].
Denise: Data.
Rebecca: I don't know if that's what makes it right, but that's what I say.
Denise: All right. Good. I try and say "data [pronounced with long A]." I think I sort of naturally err on the other side. Rebecca also was formerly with the Sunlight Foundation. And you may be wondering where Sarah Pearson is. Sarah is off this week — my co-host couldn't join us this week, but she will be back next week; so hang tight for Sarah in the near future. But until then, we've got great stuff to talk about. Let's start on the entertainment front.
[The intro plays.]
Denise: I wanted to start out talking about the interrelationship between piracy and bittorrent — and not just bittorrent being used to facilitate unauthorized viewings of copyrighted works, but also how bittorrent may be part, ultimately, of the solution to the huge demand that we still have for piracy. So to get into that discussion, I thought it would be interesting to check in and see what's going on with Game of Thrones downloads these days. Apparently, when episode 5 came out of the current season — "Kill the Boy" — it now has the distinction of being the most quickly illegally downloaded show in all of TV history with 2.2 million downloads in just 12 hours. Now, folks who've been following along with Game of Thrones downloads remember that there was a leak of the first four episodes of the season a month ago, so those have been out there for a while. This was the first post-leak episode that was available. So apparently, people were quite anxious to get it and watch it. Have you been tracking this, Lisa, and what do you think about this?
Lisa: Well, I've been tracking this really closely for quite a long time, actually. There's a lot of history that goes into this whole issue.
Denise: Mm-hmm.
Lisa: HBO was the first real network to go over the top with HBO Go so that you can actually just access things like Game of Thrones on your computer. And part of that was a response to piracy in general because it's always been extremely pirated because the show's just that good. And one of the things about bittorrent is that it gets you a better stream. It gives you a better picture if you're streaming than if you're trying to watch it on something like HBO Go a lot of the time. So I think that's where it keys into how bittorrent could be part of the solution. Over the top has really come about as a response to piracy because people want to watch it when it's airing so that they can talk about it with their friends, right? They don't want to have to wait and get it later. So HBO Go is a great step in the right direction; but the other thing is, it's also expensive. And if you can get it for free, people are going to tend towards trying to get it for free as well. So I think that there's a lot that the industry still needs to do with the technology to be really responsive to what users actually want. And I hope I'm not spoiling anybody — [Laughs]
Denise: [Laughs]
Lisa: But if you want — I really want to quote the show from this week where the High Sparrow says to Lady Olenna, "The many are going to take back control from the few." And I think piracy is one of those ways that the many — the users — are really starting to drive the bus.
Denise: Right. And although HBO and others are trying to make steps that respond to the fact that people really want to be consuming shows in ways that they're not legally, at this moment, allowed to be doing it — they're just not there yet. And the — Paul Tassi, writing over at Forbes — we have him in our discussion points for this week at Delicious.com/thisweekinlaw/
Lisa: Exactly. That's exactly it. And, I mean, I've been tracking this very issue probably for about six years. The entertainment industry was making noises six years ago that everything was going to go ultraviolet and you're going to have all your stuff in the cloud and everything's going to be available — blah blah blah. And a lot of this is also in response to people who have never had cable TV and have no interest in having cable TV. They have a computer, a tablet, whatever. They don't own a television set. They want to watch their stuff on the Internet. Or the international audience is another prime example as well. So again, you've got people all around the world that want to watch the episode at the same time so that they're still in on that conversation. But the industry has really lagged behind in coming out with technology that's worth $15.99 a month to watch Game of Thrones. So that's a pretty big commitment — to spend $15.99 just for Game of Thrones, assuming you're not that interested in the other things that HBO has on, which many — lots of good other programming. But if you're starting to look at — Okay. Well, I'm paying for Netflix, and I'm paying for maybe CBS — their over the top service — and I'm paying for HBO. That starts to add up, and it starts to look exactly the same as cable television. And if you're not giving the best that the technology can actually offer, the users just aren't going to pay it. It's just not going to work. People are going to continue to pirate, I think.
Denise: Right. TheFixer in IRC is chiming in on the quality of HBO. I'm not sure if it's HBO Now or HBO Go he's talking about now, but he says — or she — says they've used HBO Go for a while and don't get those issues, and it's rare, and usually because they've been streaming content for several hours to the ChromeCast, is the speculation there. But in the article I mentioned, it talks about how these issues kick in because of a network issue, because they haven't managed to deal with the volume that they get when people are tuning in to try and watch the show all at once as soon as it becomes available. So bittorrent could help out in that regard, couldn't it?
Lisa: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that's another thing that the entertainment industry — the content owners, really — have been slow to sort of want to partner with technology. And I mean, the whole SOPA issue really created a chill between content and technology, and I think that was one of the other things that's really slowed the industry from moving more towards ways that they can combat piracy in a way that's going to help all the parties involved — so that's going to bring users, content owners, and technology owners all onto the same page so that everybody feels like they're getting the best deal possible. And I think that's really what —
Denise: And do you think it was as interesting as I did that the way that people pay attention to every little job listing and find a way to discern what a company's strategy is is fascinating in its own right? A site called Mice.com is reporting on a job posting on the Netflix website where the company says that it's looking for several new distribution technologies for its video content, and searching for a developer with a lot of P2P technology experience who wants to test new software for Netflix and eventually implement it. So sort of a roundabout way of announcing publicly, but that's what it amounts to — that the company is looking into P2P technology to help its delivery systems. What do you think this means for the future of something like HBO Go or HBO Now?
Lisa: I think Netflix has been a real boon to the whole industry because they've really pushed the boundaries. They've been a leader, and they've pushed the other owners to really sort of go in that same direction. So I think anything that's going to make getting content easier for users, and so that users really see the value in it, I think is going to help push the industry in that direction. I think Netflix is going to continue to lead, and the others are going to continue to follow because they've been so successful.
Denise: Rebecca, do you have any thoughts you want to add to this conversation?
Rebecca: No. [Laughs]
Denise: [Laughs] Are you a Game of Thrones fan, and how do you consume the show?
Rebecca: I have seen one episode, which is why I feel like I don't have a lot to comment on. But I do consume most of my television via the Internet and these bittorrent tools, so I'm definitely one of those television watchers.
Denise: Right. And do you find — I'm not going to ask you to out yourself as someone who is illegally downloading stuff, for someone who's decided they're not going to have a cable subscription or anything other than the Internet to help them consume popular entertainment, do you find that that's working for you, that it becomes terribly expensive? How's it going?
Rebecca: I think it definitely just makes me — I have certain shows that I'm a fan of, so it's not more expensive, but just more targeted, which is, I think, what a lot of young people do when they consume their entertainment. It just becomes more focused and more manageable. I haven't had a television in the last ten years in my apartment, and I have a lot of friends that are like that, too. So there's definitely a generation of people that need to have these ways to consume entertainment solely through the Internet and their computer.
Denise: Is it your computer, or is it a tablet, or what do you find yourself watching on?
Rebecca: It's a computer.
Denise: How about you, Patrick?
Patrick: Thoughts on the [inaudible] Netflix or my Game of Thrones watching?
Denise: Let's start on your opinion on the legitimizing, or the potential legitimizing, of P2P technology if Netflix or others begin to use it to help their network management.
Patrick: That seems intuitively sensible to me. That is simply the competitive process, that when some market entrant provides some better framework of technology, then others imitate, emulate, and try to keep up. But that seems to me to be exactly the same as in any other area. [Inaudible] that Netflix would like to be able to take into account those efficiencies. I guess I'm — you mentioned the legitimacy. One question which I would have, of course, which technologists would really need to tell me — I don't understand whether this is possible — but how would Netflix be able to adopt the technology, be able to adopt the peer-to-peer networking system and that architecture and still only limit their library, their catalog, to works that they have licensed? I'm assuming that Netflix thought about that and it's somehow possible, but perhaps someone on the panel would be able to inform me of how they can do that.
Denise: Yeah. Patrick, like you, I wouldn't know how to set up such a network; but I think it can be done. I think that they could leverage that kind of technology simply among their own users and among their own licensed programs, whether it's their original programming or other things that are available on Netflix so that there is a distributed universe of Netflix shows that is leveraging. Whether it's the entire subscription base or maybe just a distributed network of servers that's under Netflix's control — that's my best guess. I'm sure people in IRC know more about how they would begin to implement this than I do. What do you think, Lisa?
Lisa: Actually, this is a really good point. And I had a legal seminar in Los Angeles with a lot of entertainment lawyers and industry people at it; and one of the concerns, actually, that they have was with cloud computing. If people were creating cloud storage DVD banks and so on, then they could potentially set up sharing P2P networks with their friends. So they would only ever have to buy — let's say they bought a hundred movies and they shared them with a hundred friends, and there was, like, a round-robin. Well, then you're really sort of cutting into your endgame as far as profits go down the road. So there's been some concern about this. So it's interesting sometimes when you look at who they're hiring. It's maybe not necessarily that they want somebody that can utilize that particular technology as much as it's somebody who can protect you against that kind of technology and to set up a way that it would be secure, so that it would go to a limited network. But again, I think that Netflix is on the right track. If that's what people want to do, get ahead of it and figure out how you can do it and still maintain your profit base.
Denise: Right. They want to hire the person that can tell them how to do it.
Lisa: Right.
Denise: So that seems like a good step in the right direction. Do you want to talk about Supergirl, Lisa?
Lisa: Sure.
Denise: [Laughs] We know about her. We're not supposed to until November, and I don't think we know how we know about her yet, right? There simply was a leak of the pilot, and it seems to be a really clean copy of the pilot. It doesn't — according to TorrentFreak and, you know, they know — it seems to not have watermarks or the other kinds of telltale signs that you would see on a screener copy. So any thoughts about this?
Lisa: Yeah. I think it's a little suspicious. [Laughs] I think that after the debacle that was WonderWoman, I don't think it hurts, necessarily, to get out ahead of possible criticisms this early in the game, to give people a chance to sort of get behind SuperGirl.
Denise: Ah. So this is your conspiracy theory you're floating on us here, that it was leaked on purpose.
Lisa: I don't think that that's necessarily a far-fetched idea, particularly.
Denise: Uh-huh. Yeah.
Lisa: It gives fans that much more time to get behind the idea — like I said, to get used to how this might be not exactly what they were thinking she would be or to see how she is what they should be thinking about, and just to build a fan base before they even get there.
Denise: Yeah, that's a fascinating notion, and maybe a really smart one. If they didn't do it on purpose, maybe they should take your comments to heart.
Lisa: [Laughs] Well —
Denise: I think we're going to — go ahead.
Lisa: I was just going to say, it could also just be a factor that — I mean, CBS has also gone over the top. And is it possible that their over the top system is not as secure as it could be? I don't know. I mean, generally speaking — I know from SpoilerTV that when we get screeners for things, they are watermarked. And you have to be pretty careful not to let those things out because that's your bread and butter, and they can track it back to you.
Denise: Yep. That's absolutely right. For folks who are doing screening, you need to be careful. I'm not sure whatever — do you know the outcome of the four episodes of this season of Game of Thrones, if they did track back where that screener leaked from?
Lisa: I didn't hear if they tracked it back, but I know we haven't had any screners since then.
Denise: So they think it's you, then. [Laughs]
Rebecca: [Laughs]
Lisa: No, no. It's not us. It's definitely not us.
Denise: I'm kidding. [Laughs] But the whole screener universe may have suffered from that, is what you're saying.
Lisa: It's possible. But the other thing is, they don't really need to build excitement for the show. I mean, episode number 5 is a case in point.
Denise: Right. All right. Let's do our first ad for the show, thank our first sponsor for this episode of This Week in Law, which is one of my favorite sponsors of all time. Actually, we have two great sponsors on this episode — and this one is Blue Apron. And it's definitely lunchtime where I am, and I'm starting to think about dinner. And if you are, too, and thinking about dinner in general for yourself and your family, you definitely need to give Blue Apron a try. It's hard to find meals that don't compromise somewhere. You want them to be a good value. You want them to be quick to prepare. You want them to be absolutely delicious. You want them to be healthy. You want them to be fun to prepare. And that's where Blue Apron comes in. It's amazing — they make cooking delicious meals easy and fun by delivering fresh and ready-to-cook meals right to your door. And the price is great. You're paying about $10 a meal, a little less than that. They send you fresh ingredients, perfectly proportioned, with step-by-step recipe instructions, including beautifully printed pictures. This makes cooking the meals really easy and really fun. You don't have to go to the grocery store, and you don't have to buy a huge bunch of broccoli — you're going to use a few stocks, and then it sits in your refrigerator and goes bad. This is a problem for me all the time when I do my own shopping and try and plan meals in advance. I'm constantly having to go through the fridge and weed out the stuff we never got around to. If you're using Blue Apron, you don't have that problem. They give you just the right amount for each of the meals that you're going to make. So I love that part, that it's sort of the "waste not, want not" aspect of it. It's perfect for date night, cooking with friends. They even offer family plans with kid-friendly ingredients so the whole family can eat well and have fun preparing meals together. Each balanced meal is 500 to 700 calories per serving. It's so yummy you'd never know that. And cooking takes about half an hour. Shipping is free. The menus are always knew. They won't send you the same meal twice. And I love that the menus are something that you really want to hold on to and keep in your kitchen. So even if you're not going to get the same meal twice from Blue Apron, you can duplicate the meals really easily by just going out and getting the same ingredients yourself. They work around your schedule and dietary preferences, and Blue Apron's experts source only the best seasonal ingredients for incredible meals like seared salmon with sorrel salad and creamy barley, and ramp & snap pea fregola sarda with parmesan cheese and walnuts. If you don't know what some of those things are, don't feel bad. Don't feel like you're not cosmopolitan. It's just because the Blue Apron team really goes out and finds these cool, sometimes obscure, ingredients and spices and things and has a great way of putting them together in ways that makes the meal easy and fun and incredible in all ways. You'll be blown away by the quality and the freshness, and I think you'll be blown away by the flavors and the selections that they put together.
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All right. We were talking about copyright in the TV context. Let's talk about it when it touches the art world. Richard Prince, if you haven't heard of him, is an appropriational artist. He takes works that other people have made, and he tweaks them a bit and adds commentary and tries to shock a bit, and actually has been involved in a lawsuit already that he won that had to do with images that he appropriated from a book that was chronicling the lives of Rastafarians. There were lots of photographs in there that were involved in this previous lawsuit where Richard Prince was found to have qualified for fair use under copyright law, that the work was transformative enough that the repackaged Rastafarian images were not infringing on the originals. So we talk about fair use quite a bit on the show, and I tend to be a big fan; but when you shift the context to someone's Instagram pictures — that's why Richard Prince is in the news now, is he's just participated in an art exhibit where his works consisted of other people's Instagram photos blown up. And the changes that were made had to do with commentary at the bottom where the original comments were taken out and replaced with things that Richard Prince juxtaposed against the images. And these pieces were selling for $90,000 apiece. So I think that sort of takes fair use and makes people think about it a little differently. And I don't know if the outcome would be the same if one of the owners of the rights to these Instagram pieces were to sue. One of your colleagues, Patrick — Christopher Buccafusco — also from the Illinois Institute of Technology — has a piece at MSNBC where he thinks the fair use argument is actually stronger here than it was in the original case. What do you think?
Patrick: Yeah, that's a good question. Not to be controversial, but I actually wonder if the fair use argument is weaker than in the Cariou case. So there's at least two points we need to consider when thinking about whether this is fair use. On the four-factor analysis that fair use is based upon, the two most important questions are, one, was the use transformative under the purpose and character analysis; and, second of all, does it harm the market for the original work? Now, if we look at the first one, the transformative issue, did Richard Prince add some form of new expression or new meaning to the original work? In Cariou, in 25 of the 30 pieces in question, the Court described Prince's reuse as adding a real new aesthetic. He really transformed the way the original photographs looked. In some cases, the original photographs were entirely unrecognizable. Has the same happened here? I'm not sure. I think this, from an aesthetic point of view, looks far less transformative. From an aesthetic point of view, he's merely taken those photographs, blown them up, and added one or two lines of commentary underneath. So it seems to be less transformative than Cariou is.
Then the next question is the issue of market harm. Well, again, here, [inaudible] the fair use [inaudible] can depend on the works in question. If these works are from private individuals' Instagram accounts — my Instagram account, for example — well, there's no market for that. So Prince, by using these in the art gallery and selling them for $90,000, he's not likely to infringe any sort of market because there's no market for them. Okay. So that would suggest that the market harm factor goes in his favor, whereas the transformative factor seems to go against him.
However, there's a further little twist to this, and there's the question of whether there is a market for some of the Instagram pictures that he has used. In particular, I was doing a little research on this; and he had copied quite a few pictures of a group of models called SuicideGirls who are models and who do make a business out of selling certain [inaudible] of themselves. I don't know whether the pictures on Instagram are photographs that they're going to sell; but if they are selling these pictures, then there might be a market for those pictures; and therefore, Richard Prince may suddenly harm that market. The fair use analysis is complicated. But if we say these are less transformative and if, in the case of something like SuicideGirls where there may be a market for that, then there could be market harm. So for these reasons, I think this is a more complicated case than Cariou.
Denise: Yeah. I agree with you. I agree that these appear to be less transformative. I don't know if I think that the market argument should carry the day here, that maybe this is a good example of existing copyright law colliding with existing technology and maybe not playing so well with it. I think the people who took these photos expect, anticipate, that they have more control over their use than they might actually have under the law and that maybe this is an area where the law has to evolve to take that into account, that maybe the market for their works needs to be looked at a little bit differently as a potential market, as something that involves maybe not precise proof of what they could make off of a sale of the pictures. I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that this is a collision of expectations here. These are not works that people licensed for use, as far as I know; so they were just flat-out appropriated and transformed slightly. And the gloss of them being partially photographs of recognizable public figures like the SuicideGirls — that just makes it an IP professor's kind of dream situation where they could also have you talk about the right of publicity that the subjects of the photos might have to object to their use. Lisa, any thoughts?
Lisa: Yeah. Actually, I thought this was a really interesting case because I followed the Prince and Cariou case very closely as well. And of course, some of the original paintings from the Cariou case were remanded back to the lower court because they weren't seen as being transformative enough. I think that he probably might have a better case, actually, for transformativeness here than in the original one, and I think that might have been something that he thought about in this instance as well because one of the things that he said in the original case was — when they asked him, "Well, were you trying to make a parody on the Cariou stuff?" And he was like, "No. I didn't really think about that at all." And here, he's very clearly made comments about the pictures, so he's added that extra element deliberately that he didn't say he did deliberately with the original Cariou ones, with the Rastafarian photographs. So I think there's maybe an issue there. I think there's lots of ways that you can also approach the fourth prong, the market harm, if you look at sort of — why are people posting on Instagram? What are they hoping to get out of it? Are they hoping that people will retweet, that they'll like it, that they'll be more widely disseminated? And in that case, they're sort of getting what they want by being included in this exhibit. But I think, for sure, the right of publicity issues and so on really complicate this as well.
Denise: Oh, my gosh. And ReverbMike in IRC just threw in another really funny wrinkle. I think this is what he's getting at. He says, "Wait! I recognize that tattoo!" So if one of the pictures had involved a tattoo that someone was asserting a copyright in, you could have yet another layer of funny twists to talk about. [Laughs] Yeah, I'm not sure how this is going to come out. I'm not sure if someone is going to sue about this. I would imagine that one of the photographers might take umbrage of their works being used in this way. What do you think, Rebecca?
Rebecca: I agree that it's like an IP professor's dream, this case. But I guess I'm thinking of it more from an art perspective. And I understand that people could feel violated that their photographs or pictures are being used, but it's pretty clear that if you're publicly putting pictures on Instagram that anybody can see them and then do lots of things with them should they want to do that. And it's interesting to think that this artist has this many more colors of paint to paint with by having millions of people on Instagram posting pictures to sort of parody, if you will, or to add the comments to. I think it's really provocative and interesting art, so I think, in terms of how I feel personally about where this case might end up and is this fair use, I'm okay with this being fair use.
Denise: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Denise: Yeah, I think it's a really tough — yeah. Now, I think I'm going to have to defer judgment on this one and think about it a little bit more. I think I'm with you that it's probably okay that it's fair use. I think that there has to be something done, whether it's education of users — maybe it's just a function of time that people will realize that, even if they have not applied a license to something, if they put it out publicly available that they can expect to find it used this way. It's not like this isn't a commercial use. It is.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Denise: It's a slightly different kind of commercial use than if Apple had come along and put a photo in an ad, but it's still commercial.
Rebecca: Yeah. I think it comes down to educating users more than a copyright issue. But maybe these just aren't offensive enough to me or something, but I would think that there'd be some other cause of action if it crossed a line too much.
Denise: Right. All right. We're going to make "Insta-appropriation" our first MCLE pass phrase for this episode of This Week in Law. We put these phrases in in case you are listening to the show for continuing legal or other professional credit in your jurisdiction. We have some information about that for you. If you're a lawyer or someone else who has to do professional education credit and you think that this might qualify, head on over to Wiki.twit.tv. Find our show there, This Week in Law, and there's a page, at least for the lawyers, that will help you know who to contact, what to do, in your particular United States jurisdiction.
One final entertainment-related copyright, also, related story. We're talking about transformative works. This involves derivative characters of comic books — not derivative in the way that copyright law usually thinks about it, but rather derived from an existing character. There's a gentleman called Gerry Conway who has been active over the years in doing a lot of creative development for comic books. And he points out that he's no longer receiving royalty payments for a character called PowerGirl because, as D.C. comics became subsumed by D.C. Entertainment, which then became subsumed by part of Warner, the policy became that if your character is derivative of another character — and I guess that means Superman came first and then this character wouldn't exist but for Superman, that kind of thing — they've decided that royalties no longer apply and that, actually, there is no creator of those kinds of characters who might be entitled to royalties. What they did for Gerry was show some appreciation for his contribution with a final check of $1,000; but there were no more royalties to follow after that. And he has a lengthy post where he outlines the exchanges on that topic and the different other characters that might be considered not to have royalties due on them under this theory. Did you take a look at this, Lisa, and do you have any thoughts?
Lisa: Oh, so many thoughts. [Laughs]
Denise: Yes.
Lisa: D.C. executives are not superheroes in any alternate universe anywhere, and this is really just a continuing history of really not treating their creators, artists, authors in the way that they really should. And I just can't see how this could possibly stand up. I'm almost speechless still, even having had time to think about it.
Denise: Right.
Lisa: There was a Canadian case as well that sort of popped to mind when I was reading this, and it's a little bit off-topic. But a fellow who had done up — it was called a Robinson Curioso little cartoon thing, and he'd gone in and pitched it. And then about three years later, the people that he pitched it to suddenly had this new series that was so clearly based on his original idea, but they tweaked things just ever so slightly. And they lost, which was good. I'm giving you a [inaudible] of it. AND I think that D.C. should lose, should they be taken to court, quite frankly. I mean, I don't see how this — as you say, it doesn't even stack up as derivative works are described in the Copyright Act; so yeah, D.C.'s not getting it very right, I don't think. [Laughs]
Denise: Yes. Well, we'll see if Gerry or other artists decide to push this one and push back against this policy and try and take him to court. It would seem like they have something to talk about here.
Let's move on real quickly to a non-entertainment, copyright-related story that involves Oracle, Google, and APIs.
[The intro plays.]
Denise: This is more of just an update than the need for us to get into a lengthy discussion, but it's worth noting that the Supreme Court has not decided whether it's going to take the Oracle v. Google case that involves the copyrightability of APIs. But it's trying to make that decision, and it asked for the U.S. Solicitor General to weigh in and file a brief as it considers whether it's going to take this step and analyze it. And when that brief was filed, the position of the Government is that APIs may well be subject to copyright. So it'll remain to the Supreme Court to decide whether they're going to take this up. This has gone two different ways in the lower courts. Originally, Google prevailed in the trial court and had a district court agree with it that APIs should not be subject to copyright. The Circuit Court came in and undid that, and now it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide if they want to take a look at this issue. Rebecca, did you look at this at all? And what do you think this means for the world of technology if APIs are subject to copyright?
Rebecca: Speaking definitely in my personal capacity and not my government employee capacity, I actually hadn't seen this article or this update, and I'm sure shocked that they took this stance. I think there's a lot of confusion about what an API is that is producing these sorts of conclusions, and even just that there is one type of API. There's all sorts of different structures for APIs and what that can mean. It's my opinion that APIs, if you're going to do the overarching term, should not be copyrightable. And I wonder how much of an impact this brief would have on the Supreme Court, should they consider taking this. I pretty much across the board get nervous whenever anything is very technological or data-centric and the Supreme Court has to hear about it; so I'm on the fence if I even want them to take it up. But I was surprised that this statement came out at all. I would have remained silent on it if it was my — or come out the other way.
Denise: Yeah, I don't know that the Solicitator-General is allowed to remain silent on it, right, when the Supreme Court says we need you to weigh in. They pretty much have to do that. Totally far afield from what we're talking about, I thought I'd get your reaction to this and this seems like a good time to get it. Ben Balter, is that one of your colleagues at DC Legal Hackers?
Rebecca: Yes, yes.
Denise: So he noticed that a Congressman, Gerry Connolly, I'm not quite sure where Gerry's district is, or what have you. But he's the first Congressman on GitHub, which I thought was fascinating. Yes.
Rebecca: I'm surprised that Darrell Issa isn't on GitHub already. Yeah, they're doing more and more policy work on GitHub, which is also a place where you can monitor, track changes in policy documents, in addition to code. And Ben Balter was one of those proponents to have government use it. He was a Presidential Innovation Fellow before he went and worked for GitHub directly. And he definitely affected having a variety of tech policies on GitHub, others being the Open Data policy, and then, as a result of the Data Act that passed last year, the standards for federal transparency spending have been argued about and discussed on GitHub directly, and now the Pitara policy, which is also another tech policy. So it's not just regular laws, it's tech laws. Presumably if you're interested in technology, you're aware of GitHub and might know how to use GitHub to comment on these sorts of things. I saw that, that was very interesting.
Denise: So back up a second and tell us how Ben wants lawmakers to be using GitHub. You're saying they're not code, they're policy documents. Are they proposed laws?
Rebecca: There haven't been any proposed laws that have been on GitHub, to my knowledge. They have gone over some proposed laws at the local level on a tool called Madison by the OpenGov Foundation, which is essentially like Google Docs, like you can comment on a document. And there's been other tools like that. For GitHub specifically, I believe it's only been policy documents and relation to some sort of law, or just solo policy documents. So they definitely have a regulatory effect on how government does things. But, again, to my knowledge, they've all been technically related. So it's not like a different type of policy. It's always about IT or data management.
Denise: Ok, thanks for the update on that. I think that's really interesting. It sort of cuts against, well it doesn't cut against having the Supreme Court handle and try and make decisions about heavy technologically complicated issues, but it shines a ray of hope, that lawmakers and policy makers might be starting to learn about the tools that they're making decisions about. Do you agree?
Rebecca: I agree. I want it to be happening at a faster rate, obviously. In addition to having a few members of Congress that have computer science backgrounds or that are doing GitHub pull requests on policy, there's a lot more of tech joining government in other ways that are hopefully informing some of these decisions, and some of these drafts of policies.
Denise: Alright, well we're going to have more about tech and government in just a moment when we talk about some privacy issues. But before we get there I'd like to thank our second sponsor for this episode of This WEEK in LAW, which is Harry's. Harry's is fixing a problem that most of us have, paying too much for overpriced razors. Let's admit, shaving is not fun. Sometimes we cut or scrape ourselves on dull blades. Razors are expensive. They can run about $4.00 a blade. And someone who shaves everyday spends hundreds of dollars a year just on razors. And when you do go to the store to buy them, sometimes you have to deal with those pesky locked up plexiglass cabinets. The last time I had to get a particular brand of razor, I remember bringing this whole huge, it was like a plastic treasure chest, up to the Target cashier who then had a heck of a time opening it to begin with so that I could check out. Well, Harry's is fixing all of this for us. It gives us high quality razors at about half the price of those big brand blades. Harry's makes the razors in their own factory in Germany. They engineer them for sharpness and high performance. And Harry's ships them for free to your front doorstep. So just like with Blue Apron, I think you're discerning a theme for me here, as much as possible, if I can target my shopping, and get it delivered to me and keep me out of having to go around and pick up items, that really really helps me be more productive in life. And Harry's is right in there, they ship them for free right to your door. And because they make and ship their own blades, Harry's is a more efficient company, which means they can give us factory direct pricing. Harry's guarantees your satisfaction as well. In each kit you get a razor with a handle that looks and feels great. Three razor blades, and foaming shave gel. You can check that out at harrys.com/products. The starter Truman set is an amazing deal. You get all of this for just $15.00. I've been using Harry's since, oh I think it was last fall. It gives me a clean close and comfortable shave. I love the look and feel of the set. My husband uses it too. Of course men and women tend to use razors differently. They work great for both of us. And we love the price. Harry's costs half as much as the razors at the store. They also have a new aftershave moisturizer that protects and hydrates your skin. You can check that out at their website as well. So go to Harrys.com to get $5 off your first purchase with the code twil. That's harrys.com. Enter the code twil at checkout. Thank you so much, Harry's, for your support of This WEEK in LAW.
Alright, so what is the NSA going to be up to as of Monday. Let's take a look at that.
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Denise: What they're not going to be up to any longer is bulk phone metadata collection, the thing that has gotten them so much in the news and so much under fire; the thing that has gotten our lawmakers in the United States so hot and bothered and wondering if this kind of surveillance of the population should continue. Section 215 of the Patriot Act is where the authority for that surveillance came from. And Congress has gone ahead and let it expire, as has the White House. The White House did not file an application for a re-authorization of that provision of the law. So it's gone. I don't think anyone thinks that the NSA is going to go away, but as of Monday, June 1, the authority for bulk phone metadata collection no longer exists. Rebecca, do you have any thoughts on this?
Rebecca: This seems like an overall win. If we want to talk about the USA Freedom Act at all, and whether that passing was good? I know that there's some debate amongst the privacy community, if that was precise enough, or opened up a separate thing, and that's why it wasn't passed. And I would defer to my ex-colleague, Sean Vitka, the Sunlight Foundation, read some of the stuff that he's been writing about the USA Freedom Act. So that seems like more controversial. This bulk phone collection expiring seems right on. It's unfortunate that you can't, there aren't ways to vet whether this is happening as a member of the public.
Denise: Alright, Patrick, do you have any goodbyes that you want to say to bulk phone metadata collection as it loses its federal legal authorization?
Patrick: At least a couple of things stand out. One of them is, in my understanding, the NSA is operating on a number of different legal provisions, not just Section 215 of the Patriot Act. One of the questions I would certainly have is, being that this section is gone, and this particular program is gone, what other programs remain? That would be the first issue. And then the second issue would be, so as I understand there were representatives of the NSA in Oxfordshire in England recently talking about these very issues. You could see something happening akin to what is happening in the intellectual property environment where there could be a greater push to get international efforts and codify certain requirements in international level, which would then bind the US domestically as well. So yes, goodbye and so long, but I would just wait a little bit before being 100% sure that it is really goodbye and so long.
Denise: Alright. From Canada, Lisa, any goodbyes to this kind of surveillance you want to bid for us?
Lisa: I wish I could. Unfortunately, in Canada, we're just having bill C51 which is a huge cybersecurity surveillance bill that's just been pushed through. That's basically very much like the Patriot Act. So what I'm really hoping for is to say goodbye to the Harper government come election time. And then we can talk more about it, because I mean ... I found a really interesting reading that they said that 9/11, it couldn't have been prevented through this kind of surveillance. So I mean, really, what good is it actually doing?
Denise: Right. Okay. We'll have to wait and see. I, like Patrick, tend to, just because the authority doesn't exist, doesn't mean that the practices are necessarily going to grind to a halt, or maybe there will be an alternate authority that rides to the rescue. I tend to want to wait and see and see how this all unfolds. I thought that was worth at least noting.
Since we're talking about legislation and policy, let's continue to do so on some other fronts.
(music playing)
Denise: Alright, Patrick, I'm hoping you can bring us up to speed, and shed some light, even though we still don't know the terms on the TPP, which is now being called the TPA. What's going on with that? There have been some political maneuverings as to whether it's going to be fast-tracked or not. I think now it is, as of some votes in the last couple of weeks in Washington. What's your take since you have an international trade and IP bent to your scholarship on the TPP or the TPA?
Clark: Yeah, well, I wish I could throw a certain amount of light on it substantively as you allude to. We still really don't know the large parts of the proposed text. I think Wikileaks, we've seen about four of the proposed twenty-nine chapters. There's not a lot to go on there. So substantively, we don't really know exactly what's being proposed in the TPP. What we do know is that some people suggest that it will regulate up to 40% of the global economy. Some people suggest that it will be the most substantial trade agreement ever. And of course there was briefly this point about the proposed addition of a tribunal, whereby, multi-national corporations could challenge local and state polities, which could potentially hamper their future profits. We don't know a whole lot about it. But the most important point, really, is this issue that it seems to be gaining a certain amount of momentum with the Senate's passing of the TPA, the Trade Protection Authority bill, which is obviously allowing the Obama administration to move forward on this without going back to Congress for the usual authorization. So you take those two things together and it's quite a clear picture. To have a trade agreement which is largely unknown to most citizens around the world, and at the same time you have it going through this extraordinary fast track procedure in Congress. So there are certainly reasons to be skeptical and be a little bit worried about this. Will this go the same way that ACTA, which is pretty much now defunct? Maybe, but I don't know. It doesn't, at the moment, appear that there is the political bad will against TPP in the same way that there was against ACTA. So there's a lot of uncertainty, which is really the bottom line.
Denise: Yes, that seems to have been the case with the TPP from the get go, since nobody knows officially what it's going to consist of yet. So, again, we're in 'stay tuned' mode there but the fast tracking of it is at least worth noting and potentially problematic, it's looking like. It's going to become finalized without any official public review. So it's something to keep an eye on. Have you taken a look at any of the leaked segments that relate to intellectual property?
Clark: Actually not so much with respect to intellectual property, yet, I've been quite interested in this tribunal aspect at the moment, whereby their proposed tribunal for multi-national corporations to challenge certain state and local regulations if they interfere with future profits. That's quite a nebulous term. That at the moment strikes me as quite interesting. You wonder what the relationship between such a tribunal and the WTO dispute government body would be. And as I alluded to, you wonder what is this idea of 'future profits'. Any sort of regulation which harms 'future profits', any sort of profit which could be made in the future is subject to certain penalties? That seems to be the most controversial issue right now, mainly because we know a little bit more about that than we do about intellectual property parts.
Denise: Right. Okay, shifting gears here just a bit, I wanted to get to this before the end of the show, because I think it's pretty fascinating. We were talking about lawmakers using GitHub. I think that will remain a fairly low volume phenomenon. But what we might see as next year's election ramps up is a lot more lawmakers using Snapchat, which has its own share of issues around it. Rebecca, I'm wondering if you've been paying attention to this. It seems like when people are in an election year they're going to use whatever social media tool that they think is going to get them in front of people, get them an audience. And Snapchat sort of has that cache at the moment. But it also has its selling point of being ephemeral. So when you combine that with election-related communications, you might have some issues, don't you think?
Rebecca: I would think so. I mean, obviously too, it's a ploy to get that young vote. Every campaign is always after the very elusive younger segment of the population, and sort of swaying them. There's definitely, I mean this is almost like an Uber situation, where I feel like you're avoiding traditional regulatory provisions by some technology that we just didn't think of when we were creating the regulations to begin with. I haven't been following it too closely. I'm looking at the article that you've shared around. I'm wondering if you guys have thoughts on where this is going to land. I feel like with a lot of FEC stuff, some things are allowed to happen if there is just not enough bandwidth to come down on them happening. So I feel like Snapchat is going to be used and my prediction is that there's not going to be a ton of consequence, but if they're .. (distortion) ... comes out if this that will be very interesting.
Denise: Right. It seems like the Federal Election Commission might be a little behind in thinking about the fact that politicians are going to be using Snapchat or are already using Snapchat. This article is Infusion and they asked the FEC for a comment and we're told that the commission has internet regulations but they don't specifically cover apps. There are some advisory opinions on things that could be close to this, and it doesn't do away with the subpoena process you would ordinarily have. You can subpoena the email, the FEC says. Tweets are public. You can examine archived records. And I think that the Federal Election Commission would want to be sure if these are communications that are supposed to be part of the public record that they are preserved. So what do you think, Lisa?
Lisa: I think Snapchat really does open some really interesting issues, I mean if it's completely ephemeral, do you then treat it like just a conversation because it's here and it's gone but you can take a screencap, so if somebody has a screencap of a provocative picture or whatever, then presumably they have proof. So yeah, I think this is one of those things, it's ahead of what the law can do with it, as Rebecca said.
Denise: Yeah, I think people at the Federal Election Commission are probably writing policies on this as we speak. So there is a good piece of confusion about this. I encourage people to check out by Brett LoGiurato. Any thoughts, Patrick?
Patrick: Well, apart from the obvious bit, I think politicians using Snapchat presents lots of certain things. And if what they're doing is communicating about electro-policies, that's probably the best thing they could be doing with an app like Snapchat. But really it's an evidentiary issue of how ephemeral are the snaps. Now I was under the, perhaps, misunderstanding that they were not necessarily ephemeral but that they could be stored in some way. If they can be stored in some way, then at least that takes away some of the problematic evidentiary issue that the Fusion Art School alludes to.
Denise: When you read through, Snapchat, I think, was coming under fire for things not being as ephemeral as represented. And I think they've taken steps to ensure both clear communication as to what they store, which, I think they say, is nothing, and what could be done by users taking screencaps, etc. And I think they've added some alerts to let you know if that kind of thing has happened. But I'm not a user of the service so don't quote me on that. I do think this is a fascinating area and as Rebecca was pointing out, in an effort to get on people's devices in a way that's relevant to them, I think we're definitely going to see politicians using the tool. As if Twitter weren't complicated enough.
Let's move on to some other DC related items to close out the show. Rebecca I just wanted to have you update us on some stuff that has been going on with you and with DC Legal Hackers, because it's all pretty interesting. It looks like Carl Malamud came and spoke to you guys?
Rebecca: Yeah he did. He not only came and spoke to us but he did like a national tour. I know he was in Boston with MIT folks, in New York with GovLab in New York Legal Hackers. I don't know if he was in Chicago or if he just had the Smart Chicago Collaborative do his national PACER problem pitch. And then he rounded out the month in San Francisco at the Internet Archive. What he was doing when he went across the country was talking about the issues with PACER, and those issues being that the government spends way too much money on this website, and also it charges people for access to the law, which some folks say is unconstitutional. It also just went up in price a few years ago, so it used to be seven cents a page, and now its ten cents a page. The PACER folks will argue you can still download most documents for free. There's a cap of three dollars when you're downloading things, and that money goes to maintaining all of the court records and the website, and that is a necessity which is why folks are charged. But you can't even log in to PACER and look at things without including your name and credit card number. Is that true access to the law and court records? Myself and Carl Malamud and many others argue that it's not. Part of that tour he has identified different points how we might fix this problem. One is reaching out to local judges and trying to put this on their radar. Another is downloading a tool called Recap, which some folks at Princeton created. It's a Firefox and Chrome extension, a button on your browser so that if you're on PACER and you're looking for a case and it's already been downloaded by somebody else using this extension, you can be re-routed to the internet archive where it's being stored. So having more people access the documents, the thing with PACER is you're paying for access to court records but there's no copyright on them once you actually download it. So if one firm or one very rich person decided to download all of the court records and put them in an internet archive bucket then it would be free to everybody. Another issue with PACER is that not only are people being charged to access law but also arms of the government, so the Department of Justice is one of the biggest spenders on downloading court records from the legislative branches PACER accounts. They spend millions of dollars every year downloading court records. So this is your tax dollars being spent where it doesn't have to be spent. So there are a lot of issues with PACER, and also it's about twenty years old and we've seen all of these advances in other government websites. Why can't this court records issue be fixed.
Denise: For folks who aren't lawyers, PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. And I remember twenty years ago when it first came online and how great it was to finally have this all for the federal court system, to finally have access to those records in electronic form. It has always been a For Pay endeavor, and never easy or cheap. Yes, we featured Recap on the show before and it definitely is a help to the problem. But Carl Malamud's work is probably even more expansive than that. So it's great that you got the chance to see him and get his comments. You also, at DC Legal Hackers, issued some awards at the end of last year. Do you want to highlight what the best legal hacks were, or maybe one or two of them that you saw?
Rebecca: Sure! At the end of 2014 we had a Le Hackies ceremony, so part of DC Legal Hackers we saw a lot of folks who were working on law and technology projects. And actually we were thinking of actually giving an award to the best organization and the best hack, but when we were going through the hacks there were so many great ones we ended giving out ten, like top ten legal hacks of the year. And a couple that I will highlight is Colin Starger, a professor at Maryland's law school, and he works on SCOTUS Mapper. So he does data visualizations to explain to his class, he's a constitutional law professor, how cases ended up in the Supreme Court and how these were decided, and mapping out with colors and arrows and precedent. It's one example of some of this predictive lawmaking that is happening. And you can imagine in the future if you have a certain issue area that you care about, sort of targeting certain states, and then trying to ride it up to the Supreme Court, in a way, like maybe, was unofficially being done in the past, but through technology and doing some of these mappings you can really start to 538 style predict how things might turn out, and like what cases you should want to take versus other cases, and what you'd want to target as an advocacy organization. Some of the other ones that we highlighted were both done by David Zvenyach. He also got our Legal Hacker of the Year award. He was, as of last year, the attorney for the District Council, so counsel for the District Council. And he taught himself to start programming as an attorney, probably two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago he really took off. If you go to Esq.io, you can see a lot of the projects that he's worked on and a lot of the writings that he's done, including, he did a Coding for Lawyers book, where he started off with regular expressions and then started teaching programming from there. But he's taught himself several languages, he's getting proficient in Python now, after starting off in Ruby, and what he's done a really great job of, is explaining along the way how he gets there and not being intimidated or any sort of impostor syndrome, if you will, about being somebody with a law background that's now coding. He wants to explain while he's doing it. And he's been a really good friend and advocate to the DC Legal Hackers group. Maybe just one more to round it out nicely, but if you go to dclegalhackers.org, one of the blog post features these top ten. I think also I'll highlight Capitol Bells. So this is done by Ted Henderson. He used to work for a House staffer and one of the things that happens in Congress is, when you're voting these bells go off in the House of Representatives, and when you're in the House, you can hear what the votes are and what's happening, but the press has to wait until it's announced later. So you don't get the real time votes that you might want. Since he knew that these bells were going off and he had a tech background he figured out a way to pick up on the radio frequency of the bells. So even if you're not in Congress, you can now see in real time who's voting on what. So this is a great transparency measure and it's also old school radio waves. And he now works on legal tech issues full time. It's a really great project.
Denise: Wow! That's really cool. We're going to make lawyers who code our final MCLE passphrase for this episode of This WEEK in LAW. Those are some great projects and we appreciate your efforts, Rebecca, in recognizing those folks and also encouraging them to keep doing great stuff.
We're going to end the show, as usual, with a tip and resource of the week. My tip has to do with in game video theft, and real life prosecution. And the tip is, yes indeed, you can be prosecuted, not just misdemeanors but felony crimes for thefts that you have perpetrated in video games. This goes all the way back to the summer of 2012 when two folks playing Diablo 3, one in California, one in Maryland, got together. One of them claims that he did not actually know what was going on. Yet the other one knew that what he had set up was a RAT, a remote access tool, that they got other gamers to click on. They had some photo of screenshot of a rare item or something that a player would click on using the forums for the game, etc. And then, once they had access to that player's computer, they would take over their Diablo character and make it fork over all its stuff. So they were going around and taking products, in-game items that are hard to get, from other players. And people started complaining to BLIZZARD about this, and BLIZZARD finally said, you know what, there's really nothing we can do about this except go to the police. So both of the guys involved in this were; one of them said: I'm not going to do this anymore, it's theft, whatever, decided, he'd seen the error of his ways. But months later, still, the FBI showed up and the guys were going to get prosecuted. They wound up settling out and it was quite an interesting scenario. What do you do? If they had prosecuted them, what damages would they, what fines would they have had to pay? It's all something quite interesting to think about since nobody actually paid money, other than the cost of the game, for the items that were taken. However, it had been the plan of the two thieves to sell the rare items at auction. They never got the chance to do that. But apparently that's what the government thought, that they were going to try and do. So ultimately they settled, they had to pay back BLIZZARD. One of them is doing so to the tune of $100 a month, till he pays over $5600 back to BLIZZARD, which is supposed to represent the cost that the company spent investigating the case. And the moral of the story is, just because you're in a game, in a virtual world, don't think that the bad deeds that you do are not real world prosecutable, because this case shows how they are.
Then our resource of the week is Rebecca's baby. Her day job is at data.gov, which is a really, really interesting resource that I'd like you to tell us about, Rebecca.
Rebecca: Sure. So data.gov is, the goal of it is to be a clearing house for all of the government data in the country. It's been around since 2009 when it launched with 47 data sets. Now it has over 130,000 data sets and collections, so probably over one million records. What you guys might not know about data.gov is as of last year there is a federal open data policy that mandates all of the CFO Act agencies, so the twenty-four big agencies, like the USDA, and the EPA, and DOD, and these sorts of things, the big agencies all have to catalog their data, and show it on data.gov. In terms of progress on that I would say that the federal government is probably at one percent of all of their data in cataloging it. There is now a mandate where they have to. Data.gov also features some topic areas where subject matter experts will curate data sets. The most active are probably the climate and education topics. And then if you go to content, or Contact, there are also a couple of different ways to deliver feedback about data sets. So if you're looking for a dataset, or if you can't find a dataset, I would encourage everybody to chime in and say: where is this data set? Why is this data set not updated? What data sets could be included? This is the home that accompanies this policy where going to try to move that needle from one percent to much higher. All of this is also catalogued with the standard metadata schema that is also part of schema.org. So hopefully if you're googling something, you're also more likely to end up at data.gov to find federal data sets. And to eventually you will find one dataset, and then see five data sets that the government collects that you didn't know about listed underneath, so you can discover new data that you didn't know already existed.
Denise: Yeah, really interesting stuff. I encourage people to go through and, whether you're searching for specific information and using this search engine there, or just, if you know you're interested in a particular topic, if you go to one of those, you're going to get a whole feed of information that you might not have even known was available, such as the Emergency Video Games in Education, (I'm just looking under education), bullying rates, etc. Just really cool stuff. Thanks so much for working on this, Rebecca, and for sharing it with us today.
Rebecca: Thanks.
Denise: Alright! I think we're going to go ahead and wrap up this episode of This WEEK in LAW. It's been super fun talking with you all. Patrick Goold in Chicago. Patrick, anything going on at the Illinois Institute of Technology, or with you, that you would like to let people know about before we end the show?
Patrick: Well, at the moment we've just wrapped up our spring semester, so things are getting a little quieter right now. If there are any intellectual property scholars, or practitioners, or people with interest in that or any of my work, the DePaul College of Law will be holding an intellectual property scholars conference this year between August 6th and 7th. I will be presenting there. It's the largest gathering of intellectual property professors in the US, and maybe even the world. So that would be an excellent place to engage with me or any of these other issues.
Denise: That's great. They're all going to be writing their fall exams around Richard Price, no doubt. Let's move on to Rebecca, and Spoiler TV is where they can find you when you're not, I'm sorry, I meant Lisa, Spoiler TV is where they can find you when you're not doing research at the University of Western Ontario. Anything you want to highlight before we go ahead and get out of here?
Lisa: Actually I'll be presenting at the IPSC scholar's conference in Chicago, as well, so Patrick, I'll see you there. And you can look for my next review of the last Game of Thrones going up on Spoiler TV probably in the next twelve hours or so. Jump in, see what you think, what you thought of the episode. I've got a couple of other conferences coming up on fan study type things, one in Toronto, and one in Paris later at the end of June. It's going to be a busy summer.
Denise: Really cool. Thank you so much for joining us, Lisa.
Lisa: Thanks for having me.
Denise: And Rebecca, it's been really great talking to you, learning what you're up to there in DC. Anything you want to highlight before we get out of here?
Rebecca: LegalHackers.org, generally, is where we collect all of the legal hacking communities around the world. There are more every day, I think it's over fifty now. DC Legal Hackers is the branch that I help support. I'm also joining the board of the larger outfit. So if you have some sort of legal hacking community in your town I encourage everybody to join it now. Or if you'd like to start one feel free to reach out, and we can supply resources and tips on how that exists. It's been really fulfilling and rewarding to organize a group like that, and to essentially gather the types of folks that might show up on this podcast in your own city on a monthly basis. There's a lot of discussions that we facilitated that I'm not sure would have happened otherwise, and there's been a lot of great introductions and hopefully more progress about teaching lawyers about technology and vice versa.
Denise: Yeah, it's a really great movement. Thanks so much for helping people keep it going. Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of This WEEK in LAW. If you've done so live, that means you joined us at eleven o'clock Pacific time, 1800 UTC. That's when we record the show live. We're really glad if you're able to join us then. But if you can't, don't worry, the show is available after the fact on demand at TWiT.TV/twil. Our whole archive of shows is there as well as instructions for how you can watch the show on whatever device in whatever way that you like, whether you're a Youtube person, or a Roku person, or an iTunes person, all the instructions and subscription information is right there for you. We're glad that you joined us however you have. We'll have Sarah back with us next week. You should get in touch with Sarah and I between the shows and let us know what's on your mind. What kind of breaking legal developments you'd like to see us talk about on the show. She is sarahp@twit.tv and I'm denise@twit.tv. You can find us on Twitter, you can find us on Facebook and Google+. Just find us. We'd love to chat with you, love to know who you think we should have on the show, what you think we should discuss, what you've thought about, based on, for example, snapchatting politicians, and anything else that you want to share with us. Please do get in touch, and we'll see you next week on This WEEK in LAW!
