A Mock Music Service Teaches Real Legal Skills
A simulation course introduces students to the intricacies of music licensing and the wide field of transactional intellectual property law.
A Mock Music Service Teaches Real Legal Skills
A simulation course introduces students to the intricacies of music licensing and the wide field of transactional intellectual property law.
Raina Patel, an associate at the intellectual property (IP) law firm Knobbe Martens, recently completed a review of open source software licenses for a client. As she began combing through the license language, looking for provisions that would require her client to make its proprietary code publicly available, Patel (’21) remembers thinking, “This is exactly like what we did in class.”
The class she’s referring to is Transaction Simulation: IP Counsel for New Music Streaming Service, which she took last spring as a third-year law student. Sam Taylor (’12), lecturer and assistant director of the Startup Law Clinic, designed the course and is teaching it for the second time this spring. It’s one of several simulation courses at BU Law that help students develop lawyering skills by performing realistic legal tasks in a classroom environment.
Students in the class take on the role of a transactional IP attorney advising a startup aiming to compete with Spotify and Apple Music in the streaming music business. Students receive a series of questions from the fictional client on a range of topics—choosing a company name, deciding which open-source software to use, navigating music licensing, evaluating offers from equity investors—and work alone and in groups to craft responses.
“Throughout the semester, we are growing with the client,” says Taylor. And because the client is fictional, that growth can happen quickly, exposing students to several years’ worth of legal transactions in a single semester.
Students who’ve taken the course say they appreciate how the simulation allows them to work on a wide variety of tasks and lets them grapple with real-world problems without real-world pressures.
“It’s like the clinics that BU Law offers, except there aren’t really stakes to it,” says Ross Chapman (’22), who took the course last year along with Patel. “It’s a safer way to start to interact with these concepts, maybe take risks with them, but still learn about interacting with clients.”
I very much enjoyed being able to give concrete, actionable advice—being able to not just analyze the law, but then say, ‘Based on my analysis, this is what you should be doing.’
The advisory nature of the class also appealed to Chapman. Law students spend a lot of time studying court cases, he says, “but the principal exercise in this class is giving advice so you don’t wind up in court in the first place. I very much enjoyed being able to give concrete, actionable advice—being able to not just analyze the law, but then say, ‘Based on my analysis, this is what you should be doing.’”
Of the many lawyering tasks students tackle, a favorite is helping their client select a company name. Conducting a trademark knockout search is a more creative endeavor than most law school assignments, says Patel.
“It’s less about memorization and applying law,” she says, “and more about putting yourself in the shoes of a regular consumer”—trying to determine if a particular name could be easily confused with that of an existing, trademarked business name.
One of Taylor’s goals in teaching this course is to help students write clearly and concisely. Law students are accustomed to writing long, thorough papers for an audience of trained attorneys, he says.
“But in the real world, when you have a client, they have no time. They might read the first couple paragraphs and then say, ‘Just summarize it for me over the phone.’ I’m trying to get it into students’ heads that they need to think about the most efficient way to communicate their answers to the client.”
Another goal is to spark excitement about the field of transactional IP law. Most BU Law students who are interested in IP, Taylor says, assume they have only two paths to follow: patent prosecution (the drafting and filing of patents), which requires a scientific or technical background, and IP litigation, which appeals to students who want to be litigators.
“One thing that’s missing,” he says, “is knowledge of a third category, which is what I’ve done in my career, which is transactional intellectual property.” Transactional IP includes licensing agreements, trademark and copyright registration, diligence for deals where IP is involved, pre-litigation disputes, and general IP strategy, he says. The field involves a wide range of clients—essentially any person or business interested in using or protecting creative assets or technology.
“This transactional role is huge and thriving,” he says, “and it’s a great career to go into.”
Taylor also hopes his class will build students’ confidence. Music licensing, which is the focus of several weeks of coursework, is extraordinarily complex, he says. Students who can wrap their minds around the myriad licensing fees owed to musical artists, publishers, and record labels and the ways those fees are calculated and collected should feel confident they can tackle any legal discipline.
“No matter what field they go into and what industry they’re dealing with,” he says, “it’s hard to get much more complicated than the music industry.”