Universities Set Up Legal Clinics to Help Student Innovators

Four undergraduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a computer program two years ago that could potentially enable websites to make money without ads. Their prototype, Tidbit, was designed to run a code on users’ browsers that mined for Bitcoins, a digital currency, as an alternate source of revenue. Tidbit won the award for most innovative project at a computer hackathon in November 2013.

Then, the next month, one of the students, Jeremy Rubin, received a subpoena. The New Jersey attorney general’s office told the 19-year-old that the Tidbit programmers may have violated the state consumer-fraud act. When campus activists learned that Mr. Rubin had to go outside MIT for legal help, they demanded that the institute do more. MIT, they argued, should support and protect student innovators, including those who run afoul of the law.

The administration quickly agreed.

The result is the Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Law Clinic, which opened in September, a joint project of MIT and the Boston University School of Law. Law students from BU will guide MIT student entrepreneurs as they navigate the legal complexities of setting up a business or commercializing their ideas. A second, companion clinic focused on technology and cyber law is scheduled to open next fall to provide counseling and guidance to students like Mr. Rubin, who face potential or actual legal challenges.

The partnership joins dozens of other university-based legal-aid clinics focused on innovation, cyber law, and intellectual property. Some are tailored to work on the nuts and bolts of starting a company or commercializing an invention. Others broaden their reach into public policy, advocating for changes in controversial laws governing copyright, privacy, security, and computer fraud, the kind that Mr. Rubin and other MIT innovators have run up against.

Such risks have increased in recent years as technological advances, and a growing interest in entrepreneurship on campuses, have made it possible for students to push the boundaries of exploration and innovation. Meanwhile, the rise of hackathons and other public forums have made their work more visible. Some digital activists are asking whether universities are prepared to help students navigate these legal complexities even as they promote entrepreneurship through coursework, clubs, and campus incubators.

“We don’t want universities to be interested just in protecting themselves,” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media and one of the early advocates for a legal service for students. “Ideally we want universities to be interested in protecting the ability of community members to innovate and to create and explore.”

While few student entrepreneurs are charged with computer crimes, some shy away from cutting-edge projects for fear of legal repercussions, and others remain oblivious of the risks until it’s too late, said J. Nathan Matias, a doctoral student at the Center for Civic Media who has helped run workshops and conferences for students and others about coders’ rights. State and federal laws are written so broadly that students could face legal risks by tinkering with hardware, say, or collecting data from websites. “We’ve seen cases where students don’t finish their MIT degree or leave technology entirely after one of these harrowing experiences,” he said.

That happened to one undergraduate who was arrested at Logan Airport in 2007 for possession of a “hoax device,” an LED-enhanced sweatshirt that the police feared could be a bomb. She spent months battling the charge, which was reduced to disorderly conduct and led to 50 hours of community service, and left MIT before receiving her degree.

In Mr. Rubin’s case, he and his classmates created a program that would allow websites to capture their users’ spare computer processing power to mine Bitcoins as a way to pay for web content. In their view, the program would be far less invasive than web advertising, which often relies on personal data collection to tailor ads to users’ interests.

After he received the subpoena, Mr. Rubin contacted MIT’s Office of the General Counsel. “They weren’t very helpful,” he recalls, “because they felt the school’s interests were not in line with ours and we would need to have independent representation.”

The university referred Mr. Rubin to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital-rights organization, which he had already contacted and which ultimately represented him. The investigation ended in May, with a consent order in which the state found that the students had violated the law by gaining access to people’s computers without their knowledge, but agreed that they had not intended to invade anyone’s privacy. The students admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to steer clear of future violations or else face a $25,000 settlement.

MIT’s reaction to Mr. Rubin’s request is a common one, given that a university’s legal team is there to represent the institution. But as technological innovation expands on campuses, all colleges need to have a plan in place for when problems arise, said Christopher Bavitz, managing director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “It’s completely irresponsible to say, ‘Students, come here and build things,’ then, if students get into trouble, the general counsel’s office said, ‘Don’t bother us with this.’ ”

At MIT, the Tidbit challenge arose when the campus was still reeling from the death of Aaron Swartz, a technology activist who committed suicide while facing federal trial after hacking into the MIT computer network and downloading millions of scholarly articles. An internal report released just months before the Tidbit subpoena found that MIT “missed an opportunity to demonstrate the leadership that we pride ourselves on” to promote open access to online information, among other things.

In previous years other student innovators had run afoul of the law as well. In 2008, for example, a team of undergraduates was ordered by a federal court to cancel a presentation at a hacking convention on weaknesses they had found in the Boston transit fare-payment system because, the court said, they would be sharing information that could help others defraud the system. (The students ended up working with transit officials to fix such problems.)

Two federal laws in particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, designed to protect copyrighted work, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an anti-hacking law, pose problems for researchers. Over the years the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in partnership with other organizations and university law clinics, has advocated for more openness and innovation in areas like computer security testing or improvements to medical devices.

“A lot of universities take a neutral stance on policy issues,” said Kit Walsh, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who was involved in the development of the BU-MIT clinic. “But particularly in the high-tech arena, several laws have become a routine threat to research.”

Legal-aid clinics are, she adds, “an arm’s-length way for universities to provide public-interest advocacy.”

High Demand

Victoria F. Phillips, director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University, established in 2001 as one of the earliest such clinics, said an early exemption to the federal copyright act enabled film professors to make clips of movies to show in class. “Policy advocacy is such a big piece of this because it influences so many things,” she said.

Eve J. Brown, director of the new Entrepreneurship and Intellectual Property Law Clinic at Boston University, said these clinics are also a great way to expose law students to a rapidly growing field of law. More than 85 transactional and business-related law clinics have sprung up in the last few years at law schools, she said, making them the fastest growing type of clinical programs at law schools today.

At the BU-MIT clinic, seven law students have already taken on 18 cases, representing student entrepreneurs from across the MIT campus (and another seven from BU) in fields including business, architecture, computer science, and computational biology. Some seek help with founders’ agreements, while others need advice on dividing up equity stakes or licensing their work.

“Our students have a great skill set. They have great ideas, but they don’t have the background to really understand what they need to understand to set up a business,” said Cynthia Barnhart, MIT’s chancellor, who noted that about half of incoming freshmen express interest in starting a business while undergraduates. “That’s what we’re trying to achieve with this first clinic.”

Martin A. Schmidt, MIT’s provost, said he expected the legal services to be in high demand: Surveys show that about 20 percent of seniors go on to work at startups after they graduate, up from 1 to 2 percent a decade ago. An estimated 100 companies are started by the MIT faculty, staff, and students each year.

The cyberlaw clinic opening next fall will help entrepreneurs navigate legal challenges, such as cease-and-desist letters. It will also engage in public-policy advocacy in situations where MIT innovators believe that laws are adversely affecting their research and other work, said Stacey L. Dogan, a Boston University law professor working on the development of the second clinic.

For Mr. Rubin, who will graduate in the spring with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, the subpoena ended all work on Tidbit, including its commercial potential, and his team soon disbanded.

But he is glad to know a cyberlaw clinic is in the works, and hopes that MIT continues to advocate in support of policies and laws that support innovation.

“It’s not enough to just have students be defended,” he said. “They need to feel like they won’t need to be defended, that they will be able to innovate, that they can make the world a better place without having too much thought about the legal ramifications.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.