I Need a Good Lawyer
No, we’re not being sued (and we want to keep it that way). However, the time has come when we need a really smart attorney to join Benetech and help us navigate the intersection of technology and social good.
Benetech has some of the juiciest and most exciting range of legal challenges I can imagine: the great majority of our legal work concerns intellectual property and human rights. We’re operating at the forefront of copyright limitations and exceptions, both in the United States and globally. We serve human rights activists in more than 100 countries. We’re deep believers in the benefits of openness, which means we publish open source software and create open content under Creative Commons licenses. We are consulted by policymakers, legislators, rightsholders, companies and activists for our insights. We’re not an advocacy organization, but our technical insights are in great demand from advocates.
We get a huge amount of pro bono assistance from the legal profession, both because of our social impact as a nonprofit, and because of the challenging and interesting issues we tackle. Many of our projects turn on legal questions, and our attorneys are a core part of figuring out solutions that will have real positive impact on society. We rely on free licenses to proprietary content and software, and typically get a “Yes!” from the majority of IP owners we approach. After all, they’re proud of their creations and would love to see them benefit disadvantaged people and communities, where regular market forces would fail to go.
Until now, we’ve operated with purely pro bono help in the form of two attorneys on our board. We are now looking for a half-time general counsel to join our team and manage the host of legal issues we are always investigating. The deep reservoir of pro bono resources provides elasticity for an enterprising and agile counsel who can make the choices of which issues to handle solely inside, mainly with outside counsel, or blended. Right now, we have multiple law school clinics that would love to tackle new projects with us, projects we actually have but lack the bandwidth to pursue.
Of course, part of the role is the bread-and-butter work of a nonprofit GC: day-to-day transactions, reviewing our 990, providing counsel to our senior team and board. But, I expect that 75% of the job will be about analyzing the legal issues from our programs, especially in our Global Literacy Program, which includes Bookshare, the largest digital library for the blind and dyslexic in the U.S., as well as our Human Rights Program, which supports activists fighting injustice around the world. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of projects on our current list:
Will you be my lawyer, please?
Benetech has some of the juiciest and most exciting range of legal challenges I can imagine: the great majority of our legal work concerns intellectual property and human rights. We’re operating at the forefront of copyright limitations and exceptions, both in the United States and globally. We serve human rights activists in more than 100 countries. We’re deep believers in the benefits of openness, which means we publish open source software and create open content under Creative Commons licenses. We are consulted by policymakers, legislators, rightsholders, companies and activists for our insights. We’re not an advocacy organization, but our technical insights are in great demand from advocates.
We get a huge amount of pro bono assistance from the legal profession, both because of our social impact as a nonprofit, and because of the challenging and interesting issues we tackle. Many of our projects turn on legal questions, and our attorneys are a core part of figuring out solutions that will have real positive impact on society. We rely on free licenses to proprietary content and software, and typically get a “Yes!” from the majority of IP owners we approach. After all, they’re proud of their creations and would love to see them benefit disadvantaged people and communities, where regular market forces would fail to go.
Until now, we’ve operated with purely pro bono help in the form of two attorneys on our board. We are now looking for a half-time general counsel to join our team and manage the host of legal issues we are always investigating. The deep reservoir of pro bono resources provides elasticity for an enterprising and agile counsel who can make the choices of which issues to handle solely inside, mainly with outside counsel, or blended. Right now, we have multiple law school clinics that would love to tackle new projects with us, projects we actually have but lack the bandwidth to pursue.
Of course, part of the role is the bread-and-butter work of a nonprofit GC: day-to-day transactions, reviewing our 990, providing counsel to our senior team and board. But, I expect that 75% of the job will be about analyzing the legal issues from our programs, especially in our Global Literacy Program, which includes Bookshare, the largest digital library for the blind and dyslexic in the U.S., as well as our Human Rights Program, which supports activists fighting injustice around the world. Here’s a sampling of the kinds of projects on our current list:
- Operating an open repository of image descriptions to assist blind and other disabled people to access the information locked up in images, especially in education (big fair use question here).
- The recent Indian copyright amendment that creates an exception similar to Section 121 in the United States, which makes it possible for us to set up a Bookshare-style crowd-sourced library in India with local partner NGOs.
- How to legally minimize the import duties on tablets and smartphones that are donated to us in the U.S., when we bring them to developing world countries.
- Digital signatures for parents/guardians wanting to sign up their children with disabilities for Bookshare.
- Human Rights Program policies: what are contingency/crisis plans for our staff?
- An intellectual property manual done from the standpoint of an organization that is dedicated to openness, rather than proprietary approaches.
- The DMCA 1201 ruling on ebook access through DRM circumvention was clearly aimed at us: should we take up the challenge?
- The new WIPO Marrakesh Treaty for the Blind: we were an integral part of the team advocating for it, and how do we make it real as the leading library for the blind with global ambitions?
- Authors Guild vs. HathiTrust. I was an expert witness in the case, and we’ve filed an amicus brief in the appeal. What’s next?
- Should we establish an affiliated, minority-interest benefit corporation, to better obtain R&D funding for tech for social good projects?
- Volunteerism: what happens when we engage volunteers outside the United States and expand the range of tasks we do inside the U.S.?
- Benetech Labs: what are our intellectual property policies on Labs projects if we host projects proposed by third parties?
- Will we act as a fiscal sponsor, something we’ve avoided to date?
Will you be my lawyer, please?
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