Intellectual Property Law

President-elect Barack Obama has named a telecom policy and internet business veteran to his transition team, a move that signals the kind of people and policies that we might be hearing about in the days to come.

Rock Creek Ventures' co-founder Julius Genachowski is on the advisory board of President-elect Obama and vice president-elect Joe Biden's transition team, which has been established as a non-profit entity. The group's role is to recommend agency heads and generally manage a smooth transition between the Bush and Obama administrations.

Genachowski chaired the advisory committee that came up with Obama's technology and innovation plan, a wide group that included Stanford Law School's Larry Lessig, former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and Craig Newmark of Craig's List, and former members of President Bill Clinton's administration.

Genachowski has a mix of business and regulatory experience. He was Hundt's chief counsel in the Clinton administration between 1993 and 1997, and he worked for eight years with Barry Diller  as his chief of business operations at IAC/InterActiveCorp.

The key technology-related positions in the administration are the chairmanships of the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Commerce, and the head of the US Patent Office. There's also the much-touted new cabinet-level position of chief technology officer and a science advisory committee to think about. And then there's also the new White House level intellectual property co-ordinator.

So far, there's a whole lot of speculation over who could go where. The scuttlebutt for the FCC chairmanship is that the choice should be someone who's not affiliated with the Bells, someone "fresh," according to a DC source.

There's no word on who the chief technology officer could be, although Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Partner and Silicon Valley Democrat John Doerr put his colleague Bill Joy up for the position yesterday during an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Bill Joy, of course, is the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the author of the cheerful 2000 Wired essay "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." 

Because of all his campaigning for Obama, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been floated in the public eye as another potential candidate.

Whoever it is, it's a position that's welcomed by the tech industry, says long-time Silicon Valley lobbyist Josh Ackil, co-founder of the Franklin Square Group.

"The idea is that you want someone who's in the White House who thinks about technology all the time," he says, and who will push for a tech-related solution in all policy areas, but particularly in the areas of health and education. 

It wouldn't be surprising to see either Hundt or any other former members of the Clinton administration picked to head the FCC and other key positions in the Obama administration. That's because John Podesta, Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, is one of the three chairs overseeing the transition team.

During his time in the White House, Podesta was also a senior policy advisor on government information, privacy, telecommunications security and regulatory policy issues. He's currently the president of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in DC that he founded.

Below is a list of technology business professionals, academics, entrepreneurs and others who endorsed Obama. Perhaps we'll be seeing some of their names in the next administration.

Obama Tech Support Nov 15 2007