Douglas Barnes

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About Douglas Barnes

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About Douglas Barnes

I was born in Oakland, California, and grew up in northern Colorado. I've worked in a number of different places: Colorado, Taiwan, Texas, Australia, California, the U.K, New York, and Washington, D.C. I recently graduated from the University of Texas School of Law and I'm now living in Brooklyn, in the Boerum Hill neighborhood. where Diane and I have purchased a four-family brownstone and plan to remain indefinitely.

Before Internet

I started working at the Old Corner Book Shop in downtown Fort Collins, Colorado when I was thirteen. As a job it was hard to beat; very relaxing, talking to customers, surrounded by books. By the time I was sixteen I was opening and closing the store.

The first programming job was working on this bizarre database project, with the goal of tracking every cow in the United States. I wrote data entry software for cow-related information. The Brucellosis Information Project ran on an ancient, room-filling Univac system, and was abandoned years ago.

The second time I (indirectly) worked for the government was another giant database project, this time to track all the dirt er, soil in the U.S. Just before I left, they were getting ready to move the programmers to new quarters. I visited this vast, empty room at the "new" facility where they were building out cubes.. suddenly it hit me that this had been the machine room for that old Univac system.

Internet Era

In February, 1990, my office mate at IBM had his computers seized by the Secret Service. Across town, the same agents also seized the computers belonging to Steve Jackson Games. The ensuing uproar led to the first lawsuit backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The lawsuit was eventually successful, and Steve Jackson and I started one of the first Internet service providers in Texas (IO.com), funded in part by the proceeds from the suit.

Over the following years, I became increasingly involved in areas where technology and law overlap. As a cryptographer and a co-founder of a computer security company (C2Net), I found myself in the middle of the "Crypto Wars" in the mid-90s. This was a conflict about two core issues: the export control of cryptography software, and the government's attempt to mandate the "escrow" of encryption keys for law enforcement purposes. The government ultimately lost on these points, but still disrupted the widespread deployment of privacy enhancing software for many years. At the height of the Crypto Wars, I gave a talk at Stanford titled "Lawsuits, Prison and Other Hazards of Writing Secure Software."

During the mid to late nineties, I worked on a side project with Jim McCoy to design a system that ultimately became Mojo Nation, an innovative peer-to-peer file sharing service that we launched in 2000. The system was not successful as a peer-to-peer service, but has been relaunched as a peer-to-peer backup system called Hivecache. Preparing to launch a peer-to-peer service without incurring legal liability was a fascinating problem, and further fed my interest in the law.

Choosing Law

In the summer of 2001 I looked back at my career and realized that my favorite part of doing startups was wrestling with thorny legal issues, defending against litigation, fighting off regulatory investigations, and negotiating deals.

I put this idea to the test by going to work for Terry Gross, an attorney who had once helped C2Net defend against a frivolous lawsuit. I initially worked for free, but it went so well that Terry soon hired me and put me in charge of discovery in a complex and acrimonious dispute over control of a non-profit corporation. Over the following months I cemented my plans to go to law school while working on a wide variety of projects as a litigation assistant.

In the spring of 2003, I helped put together a coalition to defeat the "Super DMCA" in Texas, and in the process I learned that lobbying can be fun, for many of the same reasons I enjoy litigation and intense dealmaking.