Name of organization: 84000.co
Website and address: https://84000.co
Work description: 84000 is a non-profit 501c3 organization that publishes English translations of a large corpus of literary works in Tibetan language. This historic work is projected to take 25 years and involves 75 translators. The translations are made available to the public with a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND (Attribution – Non-commercial – No-derivatives) 3.0 copyright license. Recently an academic research group requested and 84000’s technology team provided, 84000’s entire corpus of Tibetan-English translations and is using these translations to develop a machine learning model. The research group is planning to create an autonomous translation application using the machine learning model to translate any Tibetan work into English, including the corpus of works in the scope of 84000’s charitable mission. 84000 feels that the autonomous translation of this literary corpus is an existential threat to its mission, was unaware of what the academic group was doing with their translations and that the harvesting and machine model creation violates the attribution, non-commercial and non-derivatives clauses of the Creative Commons license. 84000 would like legal positioning on whether their use violates the terms of the license.
Prerequisites (courses, languages): Intellectual property, copyright, Creative Commons, digital publication, artificial intelligence
Start and end dates: ASAP
Estimated total hours: 40 hours
How to apply, and Whom to contact: Send a resumer and a letter of interest to Jeff Wallman at jeff@khyentsefoundation.org with a cc: to lmestre@law.harvard.edu
Eligible for HLS pro bono credit.