USPTO Director Among Managing Intellectual Property Magazine’s “Top 50”

Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO Jon Dudas has been named among the “Top 50 Most Influential People in IP” by Managing Intellectual Property magazine. The list is compiled annually, and the 2008 list includes government officials, legislators, judges, industry leaders and others who helped shape intellectual property policy during the previous year.

Ranking Mr. Dudas as among the top 10 most influential people of the top 50, Managing Intellectual Property noted, “Dudas is the first director to succeed in securing full funding for the Office, and his quality initiatives have been upheld as producing ‘historic improvement’ in the quality of both patent and trademark reviews and issued patents and trademarks…”

The article goes on to cite Mr. Dudas’s active role in “promoting the administrations’ applicant quality submissions (AQS) provision to the US Patent Reform Act, Senate bill S.1145.” In the interview, Mr. Dudas told the magazine that the search requirement is a “quality initiative” that makes sense, since “the applicant knows more about their invention that anyone else.”

The article can be found in the July/August issue of Managing Intellectual Property and on the Web at www.managingip.com.

###