Tweet of the Week @IAM_magazine
We met Joff Wild last year in Chicago but were unable to make the trip to Munich for this year's IP Business Congress organized by IAM, so we were pleasantly surprised to see that Joff contributed an article to IP Watchdog this week about his interview at the congress with David Kappos, head of the USPTO. We tweeted @ipdotcom about Joff's guest post, and @IAM_magazine retweeted; our tweet of the week!
Director Kappos is a good get for an interview with any professional journalist, but better yet it was Joff Wild of IAM who got this scoop.
Although he has only been in his job for a little under a year, Kappos is a well-known figure in Europe. He was a frequent traveller across the Atlantic during his time as head of IP at IBM and as a result has met many senior figures at the European Patent Office, as well as corporate IP big hitters. And you can say the same about Asia too. As a result, when it comes to the international aspects of his job, there has been no big learning curve. Kappos was familiar with the major issues already. It will come as no surprise to any reader of this blog to know that these are focused on closer co-operation between patent offices in order to improve quality, lower costs and reduce the huge patent backlog.
What makes Kappos different from his contemporaries, however, is the mandate he has for the job he was appointed to do. Unlike the presidents of the other big five patent offices – the EPO, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean IP Office and China’s State IP Office – Kappos is a political appointment, not a civil servant.
Read the great article by Joff Wild as a guest author on Gene Quinn's IP Watchdog Blog. Congrats to Gene Quinn, too, for arranging such a great guest on his blog. Well done, Gene, scooping even the official blog by Director Kappos at the USPTO.
