MIT President L. Rafael Reif is standing up for students locked in a legal battle with the state of New Jersey. The four undergraduates behind Bitcoin mining startup Tidbitare receiving additional pro bono legal guidance, after more than 800 faculty members signed an open letter asking the Institute to intervene.
The court case started after Tidbit was named “most innovative” at a recent hackathon. The team’s proof-of-concept code would allow users to mine for Bitcoins by swapping out a website’s advertising space. The concept was so innovative that, following the win, the State Attorney General of New Jersey issued founder Jeremy Rubin a subpoena, demanding the students turn over the code, users’ IP addresses and other documentation.
“I want to make it clear that the students who created Tidbit have the full and enthusiastic support of MIT,” wrote Reif in a letter circulated to the MIT community over the weekend.
Prior to Reif’s announcement, MIT Professor Hal Abelson, founding director of Creative Commons, penned an open letter alongside Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and PhD candidate J. Nathan Matias, requesting the school do more to help the embroiled students.
The letter read, according to The Tech:
New Jerseys subpoena challenges our ability to share our work. If Rubin and his fellow MIT undergraduates experience serious legal consequences for describing their ideas in public, and if MIT declines to support them, how can we ever responsibly continue to advise our students to disseminate their work in public? Furthermore, since Tidbit is an innovation that could have been produced by faculty or graduate students in the course of our own research, we consider this subpoena to have a chilling effect on our own work.
MIT Provost Martin Schmidt admitted toThe Tech the letter was “a little out of the blue,” arguing the best legal counsel for students is outside counsel “that’s focused only on their interest, as opposed to their interest and the Institutes interest.-
Reif noted in his letter that Schmidt and Chancellor Cindy Barnhart have met with the Tidbit founders, and that they also spoke with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who’s providing pro bono independent legal representation to the team.
“We will remain in close coordination with the students and the EFF to offer assistance in the legal proceedings,” Reif wrote.
Lawyers from the EFF filed a counter complaint in late January, contending the Tidbit team has yet to officially launch the project and that they haven’t received any Bitcoin as a result of the code created.
MIT’s support has proved to be an encouraging sign to the community. Reif said he has asked Schmidt, Barnhart and General Counsel Greg Morgan to develop and submit a proposal for a resource that would provide student inventors and entrepreneurs with independent legal advice, in an effort to ease situations like this moving forward.
“When the MIT community works together, we spot problems, analyze them and solve them,” Reif said. “Lets solve this one together.”
