Dan O’Connor
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.
Recent Posts
May 2, 2013
What a difference a year makes in Congress. Last year, Reps. DeFazio (D-OR) and Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced the Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act. The bill generated some attention in the press, but never made it onto the campaign year legislative agenda.
Then we hit a tipping point of sorts. It has been widely known that troll litigation is unsavory and inefficient, but many ardent defenders of the current patent system argued that patent trolls were a sideshow. In 2005, trolls accounted for 23% of patent litigation. Then, in December of last year, Santa Clara Law’s Prof. Colleen Chien released the results of her study showing that trolls accounted for 61% of patent lawsuits in 2012, which marked the first year that trolls accounted for more than half of all patent litigation. The rhetorical rubicon had been crossed, which helped put the gears of Washington, DC in motion.
In December, the FTC and DOJ held a joint workshop on patent trolls, which marked the first time that our nation’s antitrust regulators took serious steps to examine the competition problem posed by patent assertion entities. (Last April, I asked the former Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, Sharis Pozen, about the DOJ’s stance on patent trolls and she said the agency was still internally thinking about how to handle trolls and had no comment beyond that [@ 39:10]).
Then this February the SHIELD Act was amended and reintroduced. As some commenters have pointed out, the SHIELD Act is a small, but important tweak to get at some of the problems with trolls, but it does not go far enough on its own. And, at the time of its introduction, it seemed like the SHIELD Act was as far as Congress was willing to go to help update our misfiring patent system, after having failed to agree on comprehensive reform in the America Invents Act.
However, the patent troll problem escalated to the Presidential level, with the President giving a well thought out response to a question on patent trolls in a Google Hangout he held in mid-February where he condemned the practice of trolling and discussed the need for more patent “balance” generally.