Key Consumer Advocate Jumps To Microsoft; USPTO Official To Industry Group

By Kaitlin Mara
Long-time consumer and digital rights advocate and former senior legal adviser with the European Consumers’ Organisation (BEUC), Cornelia Kutterer joined Microsoft’s EU Government Affairs team in Brussels on 1 September. Her new position is Senior Internet Policy Manager.

Q. Todd Dickinson took the helm of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), a Washington, DC-based organisation which devotes itself to ensuring the “adoption of strong and balanced IP laws worldwide,” on 1 September as its new executive director. Prior to this appointment, Dickinson held several prominent senior positions in intellectual property, including undersecretary of Commerce for intellectual property and director the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He also was partner in the intellectual property practice of the Howrey law firm, and vice president and chief intellectual property counsel at General Electric Company. His predecessor, Michael Kirk, has retired after thirteen years at AIPLA and a long stint at the USPTO.

Takashi Suzuki is the new Commissioner of the Japanese Patent Office (JPO). He comes from over twenty years of experience in the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Suzuki held several leadership roles at METI, including director-general of the economic and industrial policy bureau, deputy vice-minister of the minister’s secretariat, and director general of the trade and economic cooperation bureau. He joined JPO in July of this year.

Susy Struble, the former manager of interoperability and public policy at technology company Sun Microsystems, left earlier this summer, along with half of Sun’s standards and government policy team. Struble had led Sun’s engagement with the access to knowledge movement. She is now working on independent research, including a book proposal on the quasi-legislative role of national and international standards and their impact on geopolitics and access to knowledge.

Santiago Roca, professor of economics at Universidad ESAN, in Lima, Peru, and past president of the Peruvian National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property, INDECOPI, has recently accepted a three-month appointment at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Competition and Consumers Policies Division, in Geneva. Roca will be revising and evaluating UNCTAD’s programme on capacity-building for the implementation of competition law and policy in developing countries. Roca is editor of a recent book entitled (in Spanish), Intellectual Property and Trade in Peru, a book which was initially vetoed by the new president of INDECOPI and which is now available free of charge at the website: http://www.esan.edu.pe/paginas/publicaciones/libros/sRoca/PI/completo/.

Kaitlin Mara may be reached at kmara@ip-watch.ch.