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We’re proud to announce that 2003 Echoing Green Fellow, Dan Ravicher, was named to a list of top 50 intellectual property people under 45 by IP Law & Business magazine. The list features an impressive array of attorneys and other professionals working on diverse IP issues and cases. Even among this venerated group, Dan stands out. He is not only the youngest member of the list, but also one of the few working at the forefront of patent reform and in the public’s interest to challenge undeserved patents. His profile from the article:

Dan Ravicher, 33
Founder, Public Patent Foundation
Dan Ravicher has met some patents he didn't like. Once an associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, the University of Virginia School of Law grad founded his nonprofit five years ago to root out patents he thinks should never have been issued. Foundation grants fund a steady stream of reexamination requests based on obviousness or prior art. Outcomes have been mixed. In March the PTO made a final ruling that two stem cell patents that PubPat had challenged were indeed valid. But Forgent Networks, Inc., was forced by a reexamination instigated by PubPat to give up enforcing a patent on the JPEG standard for the electronic sharing of photos. Ravicher is also legal director of the Software Freedom Law Center, which aids nonprofit developers of free and open source software, and recently launched a law firm with its founder Eben Moglen, the well-known professor at Columbia University Law School, that will help for-profit companies with open source software issues.

The full article is available here (registration required).