Every year, Managing Intellectual Property, a leading publication for IP lawyers and executives, names the “Top 50 Most Influential People In Intellectual Property Worldwide.”
This time they have a separate ranking for the top 10 and separate lists for people by continent.
The Americans on the list include former NBA superstar Michael Jordan and Google’s Larry Page.
Among Europeans are Apple’s Jonathan Ive and FOSS Patents’ Florian Mueller.
Jonathan Ive: The smartphone patent wars are the big story in IP this year, and Apple is at the centre of them. But beneath the hype many of the battles are really about design features such as icons and keyboard shortcuts. Apple’s litigation over the iPad in the EU is partly over its arsenal of hundreds of registered Community designs, and the company’s late founder Steve Jobs was named on dozens of US design patents. The man most associated with Apple’s ground-breaking emphasis on product design, though, is not Jobs but Jonathan Ive, the London designer lured to California in 1996 to work on the iMac. He was recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth and in 2003 was named the first Designer of the Year. He recently said: “Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products.”
Florian Müller: When Florian Müller appeared on this list seven years ago, most patent attorneys regarded him as an adversary. The computer whizz kid-turned-entrepreneur was a leading force in the fight against software patents, helping activists defeat the EU’s plans for a computer-implemented inventions directive. Now he’s the leading source of data and analysis on another patent battle: the multi-front global smartphone wars… Read the full interview with Florian Müller here.
The full list here.
Go Jony. 🙂
“and the company’s late founder Steve Jobs was named on dozens of US design patents.”
Ignorant journalism; they can not even this simple fact get right.
hate to display my ignorance, but what’s the problem with the quote? Is it the word DOZENS?
The figure is much bigger than that.
The vast ignorance continues “the London designer lured to California in 1996 to work on the iMac”… Ives has been with Apple since 1992; pre-Jobs’ return. For a publication serving lawyers and executives, the fact-checking is atrocious.