Patent Progress

 Matt Levy is Patent Counsel at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, where he handles legal, policy advocacy, and regulatory matters related to patents and is lead blogger for CCIA’s Patent Progress.

Matt joined the CCIA in 2013 from the IP boutique Cloudigy Law, PLLC. He has also been an associate at Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett, & Dunner, LLP and at Hogan & Hartson LLP. He got first-hand experience in both patent prosecution and patent litigation, including defending clients against patent trolls.

Matt graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center magna cum laude with the Order of the Coif, winning the ABA/BNA Award for Excellence in Intellectual Property. He received a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky, where he won the Presidential Fellowship twice. His research at UK was in computational complexity theory and artificial intelligence. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Southern Maine.

Before law school, Matt was a software engineer at IBM in Lexington, KY, as part of the team that developed and maintained Lotus Sametime, IBM’s real-time messaging and conferencing product. He is co-inventor on U.S. Patent Application 10/745,091, which was recently allowed by the PTO.

Matt is still a software developer in his spare time. He developed an app for the iPad, Federal Local Rules, which is available on the App Store.

Matt has also been a professional blues guitarist, and he still plays in local blues jams most weeks.

Joshua Lamel is a Vice President at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and the Executive Director of the Foundation for Innovation and Internet Freedom. Joshua is a veteran of the technology industry and Capitol Hill, serving in a leadership role in many of the key policy fights of the last decade.

Joshua has been a leading advocate for open source, open networks and competition in his time in DC.  He authored the first legislation on net neutrality and helped to save the fledgling Internet Radio from being crippled by onerous copyright royalty rates in 2007.   He has worked hard to ensure technology startups have a voice in policy, representing many small businesses on the intellectual property, tax, access to capital and workforce challenges they face.  Prior to his time in policy, Joshua practiced antitrust, intellectual property and telecommunications law in New York and Washington, DC.

Joshua joined CCIA in 2012 from Hill+Knowlton Strategies, where he led the DC office’s technology practice.  Joshua has a Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University with High Honors and a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan. He is a member of the bar of New York and the District of Columbia.

Matthew Schruers is Vice President for Law & Policy at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), where he represents and advises the association on domestic and international policy issues including intellectual property, competition, and trade.  He is also an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and the Georgetown Graduate School Program on Communication, Culture, and Technology (CCT), where he teaches courses on intellectual property.

Mr. Schruers joined CCIA from Morrison & Foerster LLP in 2005, where he practiced intellectual property, antitrust, and administrative law.  Mr. Schruers received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served on the editorial board of the Virginia Law Review, and received his B.A. from Duke University.

Dan O’Connor is the Senior Director for Public Policy & Government Affairs at the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), where he works with government and industry leaders on competition, intellectual property, international trade and global Internet policy. He also heads CCIA’s Disruptive Competition Project (DisCo), where he opines on policy and business issues that effect startups and disruptive innovators.

In his capacity at CCIA, he leads the organization’s efforts on competition policy and closely monitors the business and technological developments in high-tech markets. He has worked government relations and media outreach for several high-profile legal cases in both the United States and Europe. Before assuming his current position he was Director of Competition & Telecommunications Policy and the Deputy Director of Government Affairs at CCIA.

Before joining CCIA he served as a Legislative Aide in the New York State Assembly and also was a member of a NIH funded research team that studied Pharmaceutical and Tobacco Advertising.

Mr. O’Connor received a Master’s Degree in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics, where he received high-merit on his dissertation on the framing of Internet censorship as a barrier to trade.  He received a B.S. in Policy Analysis and Management with a concentration in Consumer Economics from Cornell University where he was a Dean’s Scholar.

Brian Kahin is Senior Fellow at the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business.  He was recently Innovation Policy Fellow in residence at OECD’s Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry.

Kahin was founding Director of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project (1989-1997), the first university-based program to address the social, economic, and policy implications of the Internet.

In 1997, Kahin was appointed Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was responsible for intellectual property, Internet policy, and electronic commerce.  As part of the Administration’s task force on global electronic commerce, he initiated the interagency Working Group on the Digital Economy on behalf of the National Economic Council.  He also served as Vice Chair of the OECD Working Party on the Information Economy, chaired the interagency working group on domain names, co-chaired the administration’s working group on database protection, initiated studies on patent quality and standards policy at OSTP’s Science and Technology Policy Institute.

After leaving the government in 2000, he became resident fellow at the Internet Policy Institute in Washington and a visiting scholar at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy (University of California, Berkeley).  He was then founding Director of the Center for Information Policy and Visiting Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.  He subsequently taught at the University of Michigan as a Visiting Professor with joint appointments in the School of Information, the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and the Department of Communication Studies, while also serving as an advisor to the Provost’s Office.  He became senior fellow at CCIA in 2005, while remaining affiliated with the Michigan School of Information.

Kahin has served on the boards of European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP), the Public Patent Foundation, and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. He served on the Association of American Universities Task Force on a National Strategy for Managing Scientific and Technical Information and the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information Policy, chairing the Committee’s Working Group on Intellectual Property, Interoperability and Standards. He has also served on the editorial advisory boards of the Boston University Journal of Science & Technology Law and Cyberspace Lawyer, the advisory board of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities, and the steering committee for the Software Patent Institute.

David Balto is a public interest antitrust lawyer in Washington, DC.  He has over 15 years of government antitrust experience as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and in several senior level positions at the Federal Trade Commission. David was the Policy Director of the Bureau of Competition of the Federal Trade Commission (1998-2001) and attorney advisor to Chairman Robert Pitofsky (1995-1997). He was a senior advisor in all aspects of the FTC’s merger and non- merger enforcement program and helped litigate the challenges to the Staples/Office Depot, Drug Wholesalers, and Heinz/Beechnut mergers, the Intel monopolization case, and the challenges to anticompetitive conduct by several pharmaceutical companies.

David was involved in several key FTC cases involving high tech and IP including Dell Computer, Rambus, Intel, and several pharmaceutical mergers. David contributed to the FTC/DOJ Intellectual Property Guidelines and he authored several articles on IP antitrust issues.   He is the only individual to win the FTC Award for Outstanding Scholarship twice.

David frequently testifies before Congress on high tech competition issues.  He has authored amicus briefs in several antitrust and IP cases and his brief in Broadcom v. Qualcomm was favorably cited by the Third Circuit.

Brendan Coffman is an antitrust attorney in Washington, DC.  He specializes in the intersection of antitrust and intellectual property, with a particular emphasis on high-technology and information telecommunications industries.  He represents clients before the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission.  Prior to becoming a lawyer Mr. Coffman was an intellectual property strategy consultant for Fortune 1000 companies.

Jorge L. Contreras is an Associate Professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. His research focuses primarily on the effects of intellectual property structures on the dissemination and production of technological innovation, with a focus on basic scientific research and technical standards development. He has studied these effects in industries ranging from genomics and bioinformatics to sustainable building materials, telecommunications and computer networking. Professor Contreras is Co-Chair of the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists (NCLS) and Co-Chair of the American Bar Association Section of Science & Technology Law’s Committee on Technical Standardization. He also serves as a member of the Advisory Council of NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) and the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes. Professor Contreras is the editor of the Technical Standards Patent Policy Manual (ABA Publishing: Chicago, 2007) and has written numerous articles, book chapters and blog postings relating to intellectual property and standards development. Prior to joining the faculty of American University, Professor Contreras was Senior Lecturer and Acting Director of the Intellectual Property Program at Washington University in St. Louis and a partner at the international law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School (JD) and Rice University (BA, BSEE).

Ali Sternburg is Public Policy & Regulatory Counsel at the Computer & Communications Industry Association. After initially joining as a Legal Fellow in June 2011, she focuses on online copyright issues and other areas of intellectual property policy. She also works on DisCo (the Disruptive Competition Project). She received her J.D. in 2012 from American University Washington College of Law, where she was a Student Attorney in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, President of the Intellectual Property Law Society, Senior Symposium Chair and Senior Marketing Manager for the Intellectual Property Brief, and a Dean’s Fellow at the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. She graduated from Harvard College in 2009 where she studied Government and Music, wrote her senior honors thesis on “Theoretical and Legal Views on U.S. Government Involvement in Musical Creativity Online,” and interned at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.