<p>I want to know what are some opportunities in terms of employment for those with strong public and IP interests.</p>
<p>Just to specify, I have a ton of great experience working for non-profits out of the country in undergrad, and leadership experience is my strong point. Not only that, but I enjoy it, and I’m good at it. I want to do public interest work when I graduate law school. But I also think IP is interesting, because the subject matter can be technical and I want to use the skills that I picked up in engineering undergrad. </p>
<p>So you can see how I’m wanting to mesh my skills/interests: engineering, leadership/public interest, writing/lawyering. To use these skills, will I have to split it up, by being a patent prosecutor who puts in a lot of pro bono hours, or is there some specific full-time job that incorporates IP work with public interest and leadership?</p>
<p>I don’t know much about it, but friends have worked at the Electronic Freedom Foundation. I’m sure there are other similar groups.</p>
<p>I’m not personally interested, but I was just wondering why I had never heard of it. I ended up finding out that there are some options in PIIPA, as well. Anyway, pretty lame thread. Boring topic, anyways.</p>
<p>Just a random thought, but public interest and IP are a bit at odds. Normally, public interest work would be for the government, a non-profit, or something like the ACLU. But I’m trying to wrap my mind around the theory of non-profit IP - “Hey, write up this patent that will never make any money”? “Copyright this work that will never sell a single copy”? Most of the <em>point</em> of IP is to protect a right so that you can, ideally, make gigantic piles of money off of it. Or small piles of money, if that’s your goal, but that doesn’t leave much left over to pay lawyers. </p>
<p>(Full disclosure: I am part of Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, but it either does not pay at all or pays on a very reduced-fee sliding scale. It is emphatically NOT what you would do for a full-time job, nor should it be.)</p>