The Juelagaard IP & Innovation Clinic at Stanford Law School is now accepting applications for a new GitHub Developer Rights Fellow.

Click HERE for the Fellow job description and how to apply

The GitHub Developer Rights Fellowship

The GitHub Developer Rights Fellowship, part of GitHub’s Developer Defense Fund, provides independent legal assistance for individual software developers in appropriate cases and support research on and education and advocacy for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other legal issues, with the goal of shaping a developer-friendly legal landscape. The two-year clinical fellowship is housed within SLS’s dynamic Juelsgaard Intellectual Property & Innovation Clinic under the direction of Professor Phillip R. Malone.

“We’re excited to continue to enhance the Juelsgaard Clinic’s mission of informing and empowering open-source developers and the important work they do,” said Malone. “GitHub’s generous support for this fellowship helps ensure fair and open software development under the law and will defend the rights of a community whose creativity and innovations benefit us all.”

Helping to Define the Tech Legal Landscape

One of the Juelsgaard Clinic’s core goals is to help shape intellectual property law and regulatory policies to promote increased innovation and creativity in technology by advocating on the behalf of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs, and consumers. The GitHub Developer Rights Fellow will be an integral part of this core mission, helping to train law students and represent clients in a variety of significant litigation, client counseling, and policy advocacy matters.

GitHub Developer Rights Fellow

The Fellow will work primarily to help handle and expand the Clinic’s caseload that involves software copyright issues, particularly Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1201 and 512 matters, fair use cases, and open-source software development and licensing, and to provide independent legal representation for developers in appropriate cases to assert their rights, including reviewing and handling DMCA notices for developers from across the development ecosystem. Understanding and navigating the DMCA and takedowns is often complicated and difficult for open-source developers, and most developers don’t have the resources to push back against unwarranted takedown notices. The result is that developers often feel that they have no choice but to remove access to valuable code even where the legal claim behind a takedown notice is questionable or unfounded.

In addition to the DMCA, the Fellow will work with students and Professor Malone to counsel developers to understand their rights under Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other laws as well as to navigate increasingly complex issues of AI accountability, safety and regulation. The Fellow also will coordinate research on and advocacy for sound application of the DMCA, copyright law, and other legal issues important for software developers and innovation.  The Clinic’s activities, strengthened by the work of the Fellow, will encourage a developer-friendly legal landscape and balance the scales in areas of the law that are critical for the work of open-source developers.

Applications should be submitted as soon as possible and will be considered on a rolling basis until the position is filled, with a preferred start date of summer, 2023. Click HERE for the Fellow job description and how to apply.