Episode 076 – Legal Hack-a-thon

Episode 076 – Conversation with BLIP Clinic Team.mpg

This conversation with Brooklyn Law School Prof. Jonathan Askin, Founder and Director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy (“BLIP”) Clinic, and three of his students, Philip Weiss, Class of 2012, John Randall, Class of 2012 and Warren Allen, Class of 2012, discusses the Legal Hack-a-thon scheduled to begin on Sunday, April 15, 2012.

Prof. Askin outlines the goals in the first of what he hopes will be an annual event that will allow law students to take an active part in drafting legislative proposals. Phil Weiss discusses the focus of this year’s event, an experiment in collaboration and crowdsourcing which grew out of the public response to the SOPA and PIPA bills and builds on the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (or OPEN Act) now pending in Congress. John Randall talks about one of the workshops, Creative Rights for Creative Children: IP Education in the Digital Age, scheduled to take place during the event. Finally, Warren Allen addresses how the event offers an opportunity to law students and policy makers to have an impact on a wide range of legal issues involving intellectual property. Sponsors of the Legal Hack-a-thon include BarBri, Panera Bread and Docracy, a web site that hosts legal documents freely available to the public. Docracy is the platform that those who register for the Legal Hack-a-thon will use for finding proposed language, editing proposals, and uploading the final product.

See the video below for the conversation with the BLIP Hack-a-thon team and for details about registering for the event and using the Docracy website.