Engaging Startups, IP Social Justice -- Talking Tech w/ Melissa Blaustein, Taylor Moore
Host Brian Wesolowski sits down with Melissa Blaustein to discuss whether lawmakers are effectively engaging entrepreneurs and startups in policy debates –– and do these startups know the most effective ways to engage?<br><br>Then he brings in CDT's Free Expression Fellow, Taylor Moore, to detail how she's helping launch a legal clinic for all creators aimed at helping them take control of their IP. PLUS she also discusses her forthcoming paper on IP and social justice – yes, the two are connected.<br><br>More on Allied for Startups: http://alliedforstartups.org/<br>More on Melissa: https://twitter.com/mentionmelissa<br>More on the legal clinic: https://www.instagram.com/p/BXS8FlOgMMr/<br>More on the IP + social justice paper: http://bit.ly/2feuxLG<br>More on Taylor: http://bit.ly/2urobLa<br>More info on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. Tea.
Welcome to CDT's tech talk where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. Today, we'll be talking about global startups and tech policy. How can policy makers and startups better work together to drive innovation and also benefit society? We'll also be talking about intellectual property laws, which most certainly impacts startups. Our free expression fellow is helping launch a legal clinic for all creators aimed at helping them take control of their IP. And she'll also discuss a forthcoming paper on IP and social justice. Yes. They are very much connected. Political leaders love to talk about job creation and innovation, and they love when new businesses start in their communities. But are these lawmakers effectively engaging entrepreneurs and startups and policy debates? And do these startups know the most effective ways to engage? Allied for startups is a global network of startups, entrepreneurs, VCs, and advocacy organizations that is working to address key policy challenges and also build a broader consensus around policy areas that impact startups. Its founder, Melissa Blaustein, joins us today on Tech Talk. Welcome, Melissa. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really thrilled to be here. It's great to have you. And so are you enjoying your visit to DC so far? We brought you here on a hot humid week. I'm having a great time except for the heat. Okay. I am not used to this humidity. Yeah. I mean, the West Coast is a little nicer when it comes to that. So, well, welcome. Tell us about AI led for Startups, why you founded it, and what you're trying to accomplish with it. Absolutely. So as you said, Allied for Startups, we're a global network, an association of associations. We have more than 30 members, 25 countries, four
continents and our goal is to make the voice of startups heard in policy and government. So we consensus build across the global ecosystem to make sure that startups have a seat at the table in the very important policy discussions that are happening around technology right now and issues that impact them. So Allied for Startups was founded out of a real need. So in 2014, there was a policy summit hosted in London, sorry, 2013, and a bunch of these associations came together and they looked at each other and said, why aren't we talking more? I feel like we should be in touch and learning from each other. So after that event, I was working at France Digital and I was approached to start thinking about this and how can we build an association that will allow us to talk to each other. So from that, Allied for Startups was born and launched in the 2014,
in Paris, France, and we've been going strong ever since. Well, that's very cool. So what are the type of startups that are part of your network? I mean, your association of associations are probably a little bit of everything, but is it mostly tech startups, Internet based startups, or a mix of everything?
We don't like to discriminate against startup types. All startups are welcome. As you said, because we are an association of associations, some of our members represent more technology startups, some more traditional Internet startups. We just do our best represent whoever might be in our membership. Okay. And we're interested in anyone that wants to talk about policy issues with us and engage in the discussion.
Okay. So you're here in Washington. Obviously, you're talking policy, hardcore, probably meeting with a bunch of folks. What are some of the key issues that, you know, matter to startups right now?
Well, because we were founded in Europe, one of our biggest focuses is the development of the digital single market package and the policy issues that come along with it for a couple of reasons. First of all, because that's gonna be a huge global marketplace, the digital single market. But secondly, because a lot of other countries, including our own, I think, are gonna be looking to what that piece of policy comes out to be as as a type of guidance of something that they can use to think about what their next steps for policy will be. So specifically, right now, what we're really focused on and what our membership has asked us to focus on, copyright, which I can, you know, follow-up on and bore you with a lot of details of that specifically. I never get bored with copyright as long as I'm on. Yeah. Oh, good. Copyright, the privacy shield because the review for that is coming up in September. So that's something we're talking about and in general data flows, and the way global data flows work. And then, the free movement of people hopefully with the start up visa, something that is very interesting to our membership. And just to so you know how we kind of go about deciding what to focus on Sure. We have an annual summit every year, and we invite all of our member associations to come. It's only them in the room. So Where is the summit? Are you gonna invite me? I mean, is CDT interested in becoming a member of Allied for Startups? So we'd we'd have to have Good pivot. We'd have to have a conversation about that. It is it's in Brussels and it's it's all of our members attend, and we have a closed door discussion where everyone is invited to say, this is an issue that's coming up in my country that I would like us to consider, and that can be a number of things. And then we get together and we vote. And that's how we decide. And we yeah. So we will take on usually three priority issues a year. So as I mentioned, it's basically data flows and copyright right now and also start up Visa is something that we continuously hear is very important to our members because of access to talent, of course. But that can change. You know, every year it changes. Previous year, platforms was a big issue because of the consultation review of platforms. So but it's a very democratic process how we decide what we're gonna talk about. That's great. So,
obviously, one of the answers to this question is going to be work with you guys. But what is a way for startups or what's some advice you would have for startups or entrepreneurs who want to engage in policy discussions? Are there any best practices, tips, you know, things that they could be doing? Right. Well,
I think we always say startups are global from the beginning, but startups also need to be thinking about policy from the beginning. So there's this mentality that it's not a problem yet. We'll worry about that later. Let's just throw that stone down the road. We don't have to invest in a general counsel. We don't have to have a policy person. But the reality is these things will come up for you and there are resources like joining Allied for Startups that are available to you from day one and you should start thinking about what policies will impact you and your business from the get go so that you're doing it right and that you're ahead of the game instead of in trouble and in deep legal fee debt later on.
Good advice. And let's flip it for what about policymakers? I mean, obviously, startups are kinda like that thing that they all wanna be part of. They all wanna, you know, tap into startups.
But do policy makers really know much about startups? What's some advice if a policymaker wants to really engage startups in in decision making? Well, you know, startups are global, and they're everywhere. And I would say, go look in your own backyard. Because no matter what constituency you represent, are, there's a startup that's interested in talking to you. And I really love what I do because I find that all over the world, entrepreneurs have this amazing spirit that they share about wanting to be able to build an idea, to grow their business, and also wanting to do whatever they have to do to support that and make it successful, which includes talking to their policymakers about what they need and what they want. Additionally, I would say, please make an extra effort to really invite those smaller startups and smaller companies to the table because when you're thinking about making a big policy decision that you're hoping will impact a huge company, if maybe that's your goal, don't forget that there are a lot of smaller players who maybe don't have the same level of resources that will be impacted the same way, and it could be much more detrimental to them. I have a lot of, EU policies that spring to mind. Uh-huh.
We'll leave them nameless for now, but, surely talk about them in different episodes. So if someone wants to be a part of Allied for Startups, how do they go about it? Sure. So we're a network of associations. So to join us, it's free, but you have to be a not for profit association.
You can get in touch with me, hello at allied for startups dot org. But thank you. If you're based here in The US, I would definitely recommend getting in touch as well with our US based member, Engine Advocacy. They are fantastic. They're here in DC. They're in Silicon Valley. They do a lot of great work, and they're always willing to talk to startups when problems come up. If you for some reason can't find them online, I would be happy to introduce you to them as well, and please do reach out. Additionally, if you just wanna learn more about what's going on, you can check out our website, alliedforstartups.org. Also, we have a special dedicated website focused on copyright, which is the we call it Innovators Act, and you can access it at innovatorsact.eu.
Very cool. So, before we started recording, you were talking a little bit about a kind of a hobby of yours that's way more than a hobby. That's right. You're doing Transatlantic stuff. You have done some extreme swimming. Are you ever gonna swim the Atlantic? Tell folks about your swimming.
I am gonna I I'm swimming. Oh. Oh, not the Atlantic, but I I I do have a window for swimming the English Channel in June 2018. In September, I'm gonna swim from Washington to Canada, on the San Juan De Fuca Strait. And just about on July 1, I swam from Bremerton to Alki Beach. And I was the third person to do that. So, yeah, that's what I do in my copious free time. Yeah. I'm sure you have tons of free time. It's on how you manage to swim giant channels of water. So congratulations. This is a great initiative.
Pleasure to meet you, and thanks for coming on Tech Talk. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I don't know that I have ever met someone who loves intellectual property law more than today's guest, our free expression fellow, Taylor Moore. She lights up when someone says copyright and beams about patent policy. Yes. She's a complete IP nerd, but a smart one. Today, she joins us to talk about a new legal clinic she's helping launch and is also going to tell us about how trade secrets might be a threat to social justice. Welcome, Taylor. Hi. How are you, Brian? So why are you so passionate about IP law? Where did this come from?
Law school, most definitely. I think after I was done being intellectually tortured my first year of law school and you kinda branch off and figure out what you wanna do, I took a survey intro to IP course, and I think the best part about Howard is it always teaches you the legal subjects or from a social justice perspective, so you always learn the law. But you also think about how they affect people. And in this particular class, it talks about people of color and how IP can be used as an empowerment tool, a balancing mechanism to either bar people from access to content or be used to empower entrepreneurship. So I think those were two things that when I knew I wanted to do IP and I left law school, I knew I wanted to pursue that kind of avenue for IP. That's great. That's great. So you have a clinic that you're launching a soft launch soon. It's called Creative Control. What exactly is this clinic, and what are you hoping to accomplish with it? So this is in partnership, and, actually, more so, this is the brainchild of the lawyers committee, for civil rights and Kimberly Kimberly Tignor, of that, who's an attorney there. And she's also a Google Next Gen policy leader with me, and she asked me to be a part of this. So I've helped her develop it, but this is most definitely there. It's one of them very clear. But, she brought in my professor who taught me IP law, at Howard and myself for my work in politics. Your professor? Latif Matima, who also was my mentor in the paper we're gonna talk about later on in this segment. But that was really born out of a conference that we had in New York where it was, I think, about 80 Google next gens, from across the country who were content creators, who were policy people, who were lawyers, who were Googlers. And, after my professor's segment talking about IP law, what it could do for content creators who didn't some didn't know they had IP rights, and there was just a slew of questions that really kind of mirrored a legal clinic. The the questions became very personal of, like, so I had this contract deal, and I was screwed over, and what happened, and how can I retain rights to my publicity in my in my face and in my art? And I think that that kind of need, that that thirst for knowledge about not only how you have rights, how you can exploit them, to protect your content, which is something that, when we were developing this, was particularly important for people of color because as major content creators, it's people who tend to who are tend to be disenfranchised in this scenario and are marginalized and have the least access to content, but our producers have it too. It's important that you have knowledge of how you can protect those rights, and also to be a business person to be able to explore them. So if you're a YouTuber, and you're remixing something or you use content, ensuring that you can you're using it fairly through fair use or some other means, but also that you're able to go out there as a business person and
exploit your rights. So So what are some of the, questions that you anticipate getting? I mean, you touched on a few of them there. But so clinic, you're gonna have some some clients or people that you service come to you. What are some of the biggest questions right now around IP that you think you'll be trying to answer? So when I was just kinda briefly talking to the
Lovells about it because they're the main partners of this to the they're they're providing the legal support The big law firm behind us. They're the big law firm behind us. That's great. But a lot of people, I think, were mostly shocked that they that some things they were mentioning they had rights in. So I think the basic knowledge of when you put your image out there, are those publicity rights? When you put something on paper, you express something, what kind of rights are being explored when you invent something? Is that patentable? Is so even the idea that it's what kind of content they're putting out has rights that are behind it. And knowing and then the basic question of how do you file for for something, how do you protect it? What are the initial steps to get your get and exploit your IP rights were really big questions. So you didn't have a lot of back end of, you know, contractual situations or licensing questions. A lot of people really needed to understand that that their brand or something was tied to IP and what they could do to explore that. Very cool. So if someone was interested in in help and knowledge and insight from you all, how would they get in touch? Are there events? Are there is there a physical place they go? Or is it mostly an online thing moving forward? So right now, it's events, and that was a soft launch to even see if there was interest. And from the what our events showed and the the turnout, people were definitely interested. But right now, it's all gonna be event events based. And right now, we're figuring out what we wanna do after that. So the soft launch was now and then the real launch is in the fall. So Okay. Very cool. So something More to come. Something to look forward to. That's exciting. So let's talk about, let's shift a bit and talk about that paper, which I have the the joy of reading.
And it's coming out soon depending on when we push this podcast live. It may already be out. That's great. And it deals with trade secrets, algorithms, social justice. Give us the better, like, broader, like, how do those all go together?
Sure. So they're all married under the umbrella of IP. So my my mentor, professor Latif, really worked with me on this paper to figure out how I could work in IP social justice because it's something that I really wanted to incorporate in this paper. So it's talking about, how IP, instead of being used as a tool to empower people, can also be used as a tool to act as a barrier towards rights, in this case, freedom of movement to your rights to be tried fairly. And so right now, you have a lot of discussions, a lot of other organizations are doing work around algorithms that are sentencing people. So a big focus was on the algorithms used in the criminal justice system. To sentence people in general, but how that creates a disparate impact for people of color who are sentenced, for longer, periods of time for relatively similar crimes. So talking people are about talking about the technology behind it, so creating fair algorithms, that kind of work, which is great work, and I think it's something that definitely needs to be explored more. But no one's really talking about the IP behind it and exploring how IP is this barrier, but also this, this thing that acts as a balancing mechanism. So if you think about it logically, IP is this thing that ensures that says who can see what content, who remains at the bottom, who remains at the top, how do those two things balance in society. And I think you only think about it in terms of who can see content, who can read these books, who can see these pictures. Mhmm. But if you think about the the IP that protects things that that affect access to resources, so your ability to get a loan, your ability to have a fair trial to a prison at a at a decent time that wasn't based on your race or your gender, I think you'll forget that it's tied to, really significant things that affect your liberty interests. So that's what that paper was born out of. So how do you then,
trade secrets specifically? So, I mean, you've talked about a couple different forms of I IP, but, copyright, of course, has fair use. Right. Patent has, you know, filing mechanisms and all this. Trade secrets, you sing single out in this paper is kind of really problematic because they're applied to algorithms or the algorithms behind, you know, the decisions, the tools, making the decisions on things like sentencing, and parole decisions as well. Why is trade secrets such a kind of important and problematic one when you get down to it? And it's so overlooked too because you even think about patents, copyrights, trademarks, publicity. But,
just the simple fact that it's protecting this thing that's unregulated and, also, the fact that what you just mentioned, fair use being a thing, it's a balancing mechanism. It ensures that power is not just tied to the rights holder, and it's just not tied to the public. It remains balanced theoretically. That's why we have IP policy. But there's nothing like that in trade secret. There's nothing, nothing similar to it. So, really, it's this kind of thing where it doubles down on secrecy, which in other contexts could be fine. But when it's affecting people, it's like I said, access to resources and, liberty interests, it becomes really problematic because you have this thing that's kept secret,
and people really can't know what what they're being sentenced for. Right. And that's the thing that's kept secret. Like, what what factors or how that algorithm makes its decision on, you know, how long the sentence should be or should you be paroled? Or, you know, are are you likely to commit a crime again? All those sort of factors. And this is born slightly out of a case, right, that is, happening where a defendant is looking to find out what what factors go into that. So they can say either that is unfairly made a decision about me or it fairly made a decision about me. Is that okay. So this is Loomis versus Wisconsin, and it was denied,
cert by the Supreme Court. So that was a a situation where a defendant asked to see, basically, the inputs of the algorithm and was denied and said it was fair to use those. So it was a trade secret. Because of trade secret. So that's, I think, a situation where you very clearly see the rights, of the of the algorithm being weighed more heavily than the rights of the person on trial. And in this Seems out of whack. Exactly. And in this scenario, it's exacerbated by the fact that, you know, everyone knows this criminal justice is fraught with issues dealing with race and how a majority of black and brown people are locked up. And so you can see how something that's doubling down on secrecy, it's this veil of secrecy that has very low standards so you can get a trade secret unlike patents and trademarks and copyright. And then you apply that into a a framework that tends to be disproportionately
discriminatory towards people of color. And I think even when you say it out loud, nothing remotely good can come from a scenario like that. Yeah. Yeah. No. That's very helpful. I mean, I enjoyed reading your paper. I learned a lot about how how IP trade secrets all play together in the broader social social justice thing, and it was a great read. So that will be on CDT's website, cdt.org very soon. Taylor, thank you for joining Tech Talk for the first time. Clearly, you're doing interesting things here. So we'll have you on again soon. Thank you, Brian. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. You can read more about CDT's work on intellectual property and digital copyright at cdt.org. You'll also find Taylor's paper on IP law and social justice there. And if you'd like to get updates on all of CDT's advocacy efforts, subscribe to our newsletter through the CDT website and follow us on social media. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.
