President Donald Trump has selected Andrei Iancu, the managing partner of a major Los Angeles law firm, to be the next head of the US Patent and Trademark Office [USPTO].
His most notable work in the tech sector is likely his representation of TiVo Corp. in its long-running patent battles with companies like EchoStar, Motorola, Microsoft, Verizon, and Cisco. TiVo ultimately succeeded in compelling those defendants to pay up for its pioneering DVR patents, and payments to TiVo ultimately totaled more than $1.6 billion, according to Iancu's biography page.
Iancu also had a hand in Immersion Corp's $82 million jury verdict against Sony Computer Entertainment in which a jury found that Immersion's patent claims on tactile feedback technology were valid and infringed.
[...] Iancu earned his JD, along with an MS in mechanical engineering and a BS in aerospace engineering, from UCLA. He worked as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft before attending law school.
Handling the business of a large and successful law firm like Irell & Manella means that Iancu is no slouch when it comes to management skills. And his varied set of clients could help him avoid the tug of war that often pops up between tech and pharma over how to manage the patent system.
If confirmed by the Senate, Iancu will replace Michelle Lee, the outgoing USPTO director who left shortly after Trump's inauguration. Lee, a former Google attorney, was a favorite of the tech sector.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:51AM
A *possible* hole. It never went to court because the people with standing to sue (the kernel developers) didn't care.
The GPLv2 does require releasing anything necessary to build the code, but doesn't specifically mention keys, so a lawyer might be able to convince a lawyer that keys are exempt, although that would go against everything the license stands for, so it would probably also require a pretty naive judge.
As the "hole" was never tested in court, the FSF decided to take the safe route (they couldn't take it to court themselves, because they don't own the copyright to the Linux kernel) and release an updated license that does mention keys necessary for building the executable.