About

Steven Tepp is the President and founder of Sentinel Worldwide.  He is a globally recognized expert in intellectual property law and policy.

Prior to forming Sentinel Worldwide, Steve was Chief Intellectual Property Counsel for the Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  In that role, he provided expert legal counsel across the GIPC at the strategic and operational levels. He was also responsible for leading the GIPC’s efforts, long term and short term, foreign and domestic, to reduce trademark counterfeiting and copyright piracy, especially in the digital and online environments.  He also provided legal counsel to the broader U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including collaborating on amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on cutting-edge patent issues.

Previously, Steve served as senior counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office, where he negotiated numerous free trade agreements and played a major role in drafting and negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. He had principal responsibility for all copyright matters in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions and litigated the U.S.-China IPR dispute before the World Trade Organization. He also worked on domestic legislative matters and litigated many federal court cases. Steve co-authored the Copyright Office’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act Section 104 Report to Congress (2001), as well as its 2003 and 2006 Section 1201 Rulemakings.

[heading]Early Career[/heading]

Earlier in his career, Steve was an attorney for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on the staff of the chairman, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), where he specialized in intellectual property and was the lead Senate staffer handling the American Inventor Protection Act of 1999. Collectively, he has been in or around every copyright-related matter before the U.S. Congress since the mid-1990s.

Steve taught copyright law at the Georgetown University Law Center and the George Mason University Law School. He is a graduate of American University’s Washington College of Law and received his undergraduate degree from Colgate University.

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