Brian Smith
Principal IP Counsel at Roblox
Washington DC-Baltimore Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrian Smith is a Principal IP Counsel with 13 years of experience advising major tech platforms on copyright, trademark, DMCA compliance, and intermediary liability, currently leading IP strategy at Roblox after a multi-year tenure at Meta. He combines legal expertise with product-minded counsel, having guided Rights Manager and automated content-detection tools from both legal and product perspectives. Based in the Washington DC–Baltimore area, Brian has a strong background in product and commercial law from Mozilla and early corporate transactional work at Davis Polk. Unusually for a senior IP lawyer, his open-source contributions show deep technical fluency in security-focused systems and cryptography—work on projects like Linkerd, rustls, and webpki demonstrates hands-on experience with TLS, certificate validation, and secure proxy behavior. That technical-legal hybrid enables him to bridge engineering teams and rights holders, translating complex security and IP issues into practical, product-ready solutions.
13 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
2008, Law, Politics, and Society; African-American Studies; Asian Studies, 2008, Law, Politics, and Society; African-American Studies; Asian Studies at Bard College at Simon's RockJD, Law, JD, Law at New York University School of LawN/A, Government, Culture, N/A, Government, Culture at Sophia University
Github Skills (48)
algorithm10
code-optimization10
algorithms10
service-mesh10
c-language10
tls1210
cert10
wp-api10
decryption10
testing10
it-security10
configuration-management10
winapi10
acme10
tls1310
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
briansmith/ring
Feb 2015 - Nov 2022
Safe, fast, small crypto using Rust
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:343 reviews, 4434 commits, 2237 PRs in 7 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Brian's commits focused on refactoring and improving the performance of core cryptographic functions within the `ring` repository, a Rust cryptography library. The contributions included refactoring existing functions like `limbs_mul_mont`, `limbs_square_mont`, and other arithmetic functions to enhance memory safety and performance. Moreover, the user added support to enforce maximum input lengths for key generation as well as addressing specific compiler warnings.
cryptographyrustsecuritycryptosafe
briansmith/webpki
Aug 2015 - Dec 2021
WebPKI X.509 Certificate Validation in Rust
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:35 reviews, 339 commits, 213 PRs in 6 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Brian contributed significantly to the `webpki` repository, focusing on developing a robust X.509 certificate validation library in Rust. They implemented foundational parsing frameworks for input readers and ASN.1 DER data, which are core to the library's functionality. Their work included adding essential features such as reading functions and the validation of certificate properties like `notBefore` and `notAfter`, and extending features for name validation. Additionally, the user integrated tests and improved parsing of several certificates.
validationrustwebpkicertificatecertificate-validation
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