In October, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum focused towards issues related to interoperability within European standardization and framed against the backdrop of the current EU activities. In addition to a series of expert keynote contributions (summarized below – please follow the links to access the articles in full) two exclusive interviews were conducted. The event can be found her: www.talkstandards.com/reforming-eu-standardization.

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All forum discussion will take place on this page!

This event (Thurs October 14th –  3pm GMT / 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 5pm CET / 11pm Beijing) is set to discuss mobile payment and transfer services.

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Address the “holes” in existing standardization:

1. Help define the basic terms.
Without clear definitions, practice will be slipshod.
• What is a standard? It is not practical to transfer anything without a reference. Such ubiquity strongly suggests a “physical” law and mathematical form.
• What is an open standard? Most current descriptions are very biased.
• What is an open standardization process? Is it no IPR? Is RAND sufficient? Free standards documents? Fair representation of all stakeholders? World wide agreement?
“Open standards” is like “democratic government,” it is easy to say but very hard to achieve. First define it. (This task is underway in the EU, but deserves much higher visibility.) Then work to make it more likely.

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During August, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum focused towards a number of issues related to the tension between traditional software development business models, FRAND and RAND IPR licensing requirements and the open source community. The event was structured such that two featured articles were posted by Talkstandards regular Stacy Baird (Managing Director of Citrus Co.) and James Bryce Clark (from OASIS). In response to these featured articles, a series of expert contributors were invited to post introductory remarks, upon which the event discussion took place. These articles are summarized below. Please follow the links to access the articles in full.

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Patents have long served to enable innovation while assuring the complete disclosure of inventions and a reasonable return to inventors. Many open standards incorporate patented inventions. To ensure public access to IP in open standards, governments and industry have supported an equal rights provision: reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing for patents included in standards. But for some, equality is insufficient. Some in the OSS community want to do away with these royalties (or any other RAND based licensing terms, such as scope of use or prohibitions on sublicensing) all together.
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There is a lot of discussion around how free and open source software (FOSS) can be used in a scalable business and what business models support using FOSS. This is often captured in questions about how one makes money when one gives the product away for free. Likewise there are concerns raised over how IPR rights in standards organizations need to be managed to enable FOSS implementations. A few definitions help tease apart the discussions so various paths through become apparent. For this discussion I’ll assume the actors are all well behaved, i.e. no plagiarists, submarines, or trolls.
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What is the problem? Is this actually a “problem” or a matter of differing goals? What is the lesson? Is it possible that the real problem is the market distortion that could occur when advocates from one side promote government intervention to their advantage (and to the disadvantage of other development and distribution models)? Government policy makers contemplating to alter rules affecting standards setting must exercise extreme caution.
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There are some open source advocates who have framed this debate somewhat broadly by suggesting that a RAND-based license which includes a royalty is incompatible with open source licenses. For example, by using phrases such as “RAND discriminates against Open Source developers” or “RAND is incompatible with OSS,” they seek to reinforce this broad problem statement.
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Proponents of open source software are a creative bunch. Their flexible, open and collaborative way of working has certainly led to innovation not only in software development but also in the way that we now view many aspects of public policy.

On the positive side, the understanding of open source principles and ways of working has motivated us all to be more transparent, more open to creative partnerships and to place a premium on innovation as a public good.
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Many discussions around the interplay between Open Source Software (OSS) licensing and Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (RAND) licensing of essential patent claims immediately jump to the question of patent royalties. To the lay person, it might appear a simple debate: patent royalties in RAND regimes are the basis of tension between RAND and “Open Source.” Peering deeper into the issues, however, reveals that neither RAND nor OSS are singular or uniform concepts capable of such a simple comparison as this. Moreover, lost in the complexity of the purely legal analysis are a range of important policy questions (some of which I have tried to set out below).
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