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Trademarks Official Takes Tech-Transfer Job
by Sarah Lai Stirland
After five years as the trademarks commissioner at the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), Anne Chasser has returned to academia to focus on moving university research to the marketplace. The University of Cincinnati recently announced that it has named Chasser as its associate vice president for technology transfer and commercialization.
Chasser's job is to help the university increase the research funding it receives from the federal government in the next five years by 50 percent. It currently receives about $300 million a year from institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
A 1980 law changed the way universities can retain ownership of federally funded research. Since the enactment of the law, university researchers are obligated to disclose any federally funded inventions to the technology transfer offices of their universities so the offices can evaluate the inventions' potential for patents, Chasser said.
The job of her office at the university is to evaluate the licensing and business-development potential of such research. Currently, the university receives about 100 invention disclosures a year, Chasser said. Chasser manages nine staffers who perform the evaluations.
The former PTO commissioner said she hopes the university's research commercialization efforts will help spur local economic development in the form of new startup companies. Areas of strength for the university include a new genome research institution, as well as biomedical engineering and research into devices for drug delivery.
Before joining PTO, Chasser was director of trademark and licensing services at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.
Chamber Hires Intellectual Property Expert
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce last week announced that it has hired Brad Huther, president and CEO of the International Intellectual Property Institute (IIPI), as the director of the group's new counterfeiting and piracy initiative.
"Combating counterfeiting and piracy is a top priority for the chamber," David Hirschman, the group's senior vice president, said in a statement. "Most people do not realize pirated and counterfeit products cost the U.S. economy $250 billion a year, cause huge losses in jobs and have other significant consequences, such as health and safety dangers."
Huther comes to the chamber just a few months after he joined IIPI. Before that, he worked at PTO for many years. From 2002 to 2003, he served as a senior adviser to former PTO chief James Rogan. He helped Rogan develop the framework for a five-year PTO business plan and worked on legislative solutions to PTO's budget challenges. Before that, Huther was a special attache to the World Intellectual Property Organization from 1999 to 2002.
Huther's new position caps a move by the chamber over the past three months to make counterfeiting and piracy one of its top priorities. During that time, the chamber has increased its presence in China and Brazil and hired Rachel Ding from the Quality Brands Protection Committee as manager of its counterfeiting and piracy initiative.
The committee consists of more than 100 multinational companies that want to curtail counterfeiting. Ding most recently worked for the committee in China.
File-Sharing Company Hires Legal Counsel
Snocap, an online licensing and copyright clearinghouse for the digital-music marketplace, recently hired Christian Castle as its first vice president of legal affairs and general counsel. Castle is an attorney who has advised Snocap since its founding last year. He will report to Ali Aydar, the company's chief operating officer.
The San Francisco-based company was founded by Shawn Fanning, also the founder of the Napster file-sharing service, as well as former Napster Chief Software Architect Jordan Mendelson and Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. Snocap is funded by a $10 million round of venture financing from WaldenVC and Morgenthaler Ventures.
Napster was forced to close in 2001 after being sued by the music industry, which claimed that the company's file-sharing technology enabled users to infringe copyrighted works. Napster's assets were later sold, and it is now operating as an online music service.
Snocap is working with the music industry to develop a legitimate online marketplace for music and bills itself as "a content registry and clearinghouse [that] enables record labels, publishers and individual artists to sell their entire catalogs through peer-to-peer networks and online retailers."
Castle's job will be to structure and negotiate licensing deals with recording labels and artists who are interested in using the Snocap service to distribute their music online. The service is slated to launch sometime this year, according to the company's Web site.
Before joining Snocap, Castle worked as an attorney at the law firms of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Silicon Valley and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Los Angeles. Castle is writing a book called "This Business of Record Producing" and is an adviser to the Austin Music Foundation and the Austin Music Incubator, which helps musicians develop their careers.
Castle also was involved in negotiating digital rights on behalf of record producers with the royalties-management group SoundExchange.
Bush Names New Exports Official
President Bush on Friday tapped Peter Lichtenbaum to serve as acting undersecretary of Commerce for export administration.
Lichtenbaum succeeds Kenneth Juster as head of the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS). Juster left the agency earlier this month to join Salesforce.com in San Francisco as its executive vice president of legal affairs and corporate development.
Lichtenbaum is currently an assistant secretary at Commerce, and he oversees BIS policies on export controls. Before joining Commerce, he worked at the Steptoe & Johnson law firm in its international practice group.
The agency Lichtenbaum is heading regulates foreign access to and exports of high-technology items such as microprocessors.
Intellectual Property PAC Officials Visit Washington
The board of IPac, the political action committee formed to help fund the campaigns of members of Congress who support what IPac sees as balanced intellectual property laws, stopped in the nation's capital for a short visit last Wednesday to see Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., and Public Knowledge President Gigi Sohn.
IPac is working to publicize what it views as good and bad intellectual property politics and policy. The group is holding a series of cocktail parties this year in key cities.
On its recent trip to Washington, the group met with people in the local technology community at a bar in the Chinatown district. An earlier party was held in San Francisco.
The group's board members include: President David Alpert, who works as a product manager at Google in New York; Treasurer Matt Stoller, a Washington-based political consultant; and Secretary Ren Bucholz, an activist and grassroots organizer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
IPac said on its Web site that it plans to use traditional political techniques to push for favorable intellectual property and innovation policies by creating a congressional voting scorecard, conducting polling, using issue advertising and contributing financially to political candidates.
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