In December 2013 I was really lucky to be able to attend the OpenAIR and Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest, a 5 day conference held at the UCT Graduate School of Business, hosted by the UCT IP Unit. I was really excited to meet a group of people who were talking about intellectual property in a way I hadn’t previously experienced. The attendees were mostly academics and Creative Commons affiliates. This group is opposed to maximalist protection of intellectual property rights, and they are all about open access and sharing culture. It was certainly a stark contrast with my experience at the US Copyright Office, and made me seriously consider doing an LLM in intellectual property law.