AT&T chief launches US IP Alliance; wants ‘every citizen to join’

Excerpted from ManagingIP.com

IP CEO Scott Frank, former USPTO head David Kappos, and former Federal Circuit judge Paul Michel say the USIPA meets a dire need for public education on IP

Intellectual property leaders today launched the US IP Alliance, an organisation geared towards uniting IP groups, creators and owners in a mission to educate the general public across 50 states on the value of patents, trademarks, copyright and other forms of IP.

The national non-profit, which was spearheaded by AT&T IP CEO Scott Frank and modelled on the Georgia IP Alliance, has 60 board members from across the IP landscape, including representatives at the USPTO, AIPLA, IPO, Chamber of Commerce and state alliances in New York and Illinois.

The USIPA has a three-pronged mandate to drive awareness and education, enable ecosystem collaboration, and facilitate diversity and inclusion – goals it will look to achieve, in part, by co-ordinating the efforts of 11 state and local IP alliances, including the Georgia IP Alliance.

Frank, who is chair of the USIPA executive committee and has been AT&T's IP head for 15 years, tells Managing IP that the group is open to everyone who is interested in IP, and that he’s excited to get as many people involved as possible.

“One of the main things that differentiates us from other IP organisations is we’re not just IP professionals – we’re everyone in the US,” he says. “Our ultimate goal is to have every citizen in the US become a member.”

David Kappos, former USPTO director and partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York, and Paul Michel, former chief judge at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, will serve as vice chairs of the USIPA executive committee.

“The USIPA gives us an opportunity to knit together the fabric of IP organisations we have across this country and incredible diversity of them, and to increase the level of IP information flow and co-ordination at an appropriate local level,” Kappos tells Managing IP.

“We didn’t have anything like this before.”

Michel adds: “There is a huge need for better education about IP systems among policy makers and the general public. That need wasn’t previously being adequately met by prior efforts – which were useful and appropriate but not sufficient.”

Frank at AT&T had been seeking to launch a national version of the Georgia IP Alliance since at least late 2019, when he first told this publication about his intent to launch the USIPA, and perhaps even a Global IP Alliance.

He says a combination of the reception to that article and the COVID pandemic, which forced people across the US to work from home and made it easier to communicate with them by video conference, helped the USIPA become a reality sooner than it otherwise might have.

“The group’s establishment this year comes about in large part because of Managing IP,” says Frank. “It would have come about eventually anyway, but that article sparked a whole lot of emails and phone calls, which led to the creation of a lot of other state IP alliances over the past year.”