Brian Kahin
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.
Recent Posts
June 14, 2013
Last week, the White House released its agenda of legislative priorities and executive actions on high-tech patent issues. It was accompanied by a report, Patent Assertion and U.S. Innovation, that builds on recent research and makes the case for the agenda. The agenda is attributed to the White House Task Force on High-Tech Patent Issues, while the report is a joint product of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the National Economic Council (NEC), and the Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Like the various proposals brewing in Congress, it is directed at patent assertion entities (PAEs), more commonly known as trolls. But with seven legislative measures, five executive actions, and the report, the White House agenda is distinctly ambitious.
It is quite unusual for the White House to assume leadership on patent reform. To my memory, the only comparable initiative was the President’s Commission on the Patent System of 1965-1966. At President Johnson’s request, the Commission took a broad look at the patent system in a time of technological change and issued its report as “‘To Promote the Progress of …Useful Arts’ in an Era of Exploding Technology.” The report made 35 thoughtful recommendations (including recommending against software patents) but got little political traction beyond the administration. As noted by Commission member James Birkenstock (IBM):
The commission members were greatly pleased that the Johnson administration accepted all of its recommendations. Regrettably, only a few were enacted into law due to the highly influential Patent Law Bar that opposed most of the recommendations.
The Obama administration’s initiative is narrower, more targeted, and well-documented. The report not only examines the troll problem in depth but links it to fundamental problems of functional claiming in software, uncertainty in the face of massive patenting, and the overshadowing of R&D by strategic patent acquisition and assertion. The report recognizes that it is not just a problem of restraining and sanctioning a few bad actors.