[Ecommerce] IP-Watch: Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

<SNIP>

David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been
interested to see how much IP issues had come up. =93IP issues of course
are always an important issue,=94 said Gross, the US coordinator for
international communications and information policy. =93But there are
many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World
Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade
Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for
these issues was interesting to me.=94 But Gross called it a misused
opportunity that issues of the free flow of


<SNIP>

=93Standards are invisible, they are shadow policy making, shadow
governance,=94 Struble said at the Rio meeting. It is necessary to learn
about standardisation and understand that there were not only a few
large standardisation bodies, but hundreds of industry consortia
engaged in this. The purpose of the coalition is to educate
governments that there is an issue and that IP and standards could
influence development.

The coalition was happy to find the standards issue mentioned by
Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology Sergio Rezende, and
Anriette Esterhuysen, chair of the Association for Progressive
Communication.

Esterhuysen said: =93Increasingly, there are standards being made
outside of public spaces that have social implications that limit what
people can do with the Internet, and the IGF needs to address this.
This touches on issues of intellectual property, and interoperability
between different applications and devices. And these are things that
impact on the cost.=94

<SNIP>

The introduction of a Development Agenda at the World Intellectual
Property Organisation was applauded in Rio by both the open standards
and the access to knowledge (A2K) coalitions.

Both groups now look forward to implementation of the various measures
decided upon in the Development Agenda. =93Open standards are in,=94 said
Thiru Balasubramaniam of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI).
[Clarification: this comment referred to the WIPO Standing Committee
on Patents, but standards could appear in the Development Agenda] The
activists also are satisfied with the planned report to be delivered
by WIPO=92s committee on patents about the cost of licensing next year.

Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, also pointed to
implementation of the Development Agenda. =93We now can talk on meat and
potatoes,=94 she said. A proposed access to knowledge treaty mentioned
in the new agenda might take a long time, she said, yet the attention
on the issue is rising. The A2K coalition over the last year narrowed
the gap between organisations and activists working on the issue from
north and south. In Rio, the A2K coalition also presented parts of a
larger study on bilateral and regional free trade agreements
undertaken by a team under Professor Mary Wong at Franklin Pierce Law
Center (US). Concern is that more stringent IP rules may be pushed
bilaterally when they are not obtainable at the multilateral level.


--------------------

http://ip-watch.org/weblog/wp-trackback.php?p=3D828

19 November 2007
Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF



By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch
RIO DE JANEIRO - Intellectual property-related issues were a topic
avoided by governments during the 2003-2005 World Summit on the
Information Society, which gave way to the Internet Governance Forum
(IGF). But at the second IGF in Rio de Janeiro last week there were
several IP-related workshops.

Organisers of the dynamic coalitions on open standards, access to
knowledge and the newly formed coalition on digital education said
they were satisfied with the attention IP issues drew.

David Gross, the United States delegation lead, said he had been
interested to see how much IP issues had come up. =93IP issues of course
are always an important issue,=94 said Gross, the US coordinator for
international communications and information policy. =93But there are
many other places devoted to that topic, like WIPO [the World
Intellectual Property Organization] or WTO [the World Trade
Organization]. The fact that people think that the IGF is a place for
these issues was interesting to me.=94 But Gross called it a misused
opportunity that issues of the free flow of information had not come
up more instead.

Members of a new coalition on digital education, which brings together
teachers, academics, publishers, technologists and politicians, will
organise a survey on the influence of IP protection in classrooms
worldwide. They also intend to work on digital education publishing
channels to create a system for educational publishing, members of the
Information Society Project at Yale Law School told Intellectual
Property Watch. =93Although the digital age holds great promise for
educators and learners, information policy and regulation has not
sufficiently focused on the unique context of education,=94 the new
coalition members wrote in their first declaration.

New antitrust investigation against Microsoft

The open standards coalition invited Clifford Chance lawyer Thomas
Vinje to Rio to give insights into a new antitrust case of the
European Union against Microsoft. Vinje represented the European
Committee on Interoperable Systems (ECIS) in the first antitrust case
against Microsoft. Vinje told a press conference that the EU
Competition Commissioner=92s office, with the first case decided by the
EU Court of First Instance, now has started working intensively on the
second case.

The new case involves three main aspects. First, Microsoft allegedly
barred providers of other text document formats access to information
that would them allow to make their products fully compatible with
computers running on Microsoft=92s operating systems. =93You may have
experienced that sometimes open office documents can be received by
Microsoft users, sometimes not.=94

Second, for email and collaboration software Microsoft also may have
privileged their own products like Outlook with regard to interfacing
with Microsoft=92s Exchange servers. The third, and according to Vinje,
most relevant to the Internet and work done at the IGF, was the
problem of growing .NET-dependency for web applications. .NET is
Microsoft=92s platform for web applications software development. =93It is
a sort of an effort to =91proprietise=92 the Internet,=94 said Vinje.

He saw this as =93the same kind of behaviour=94 that had been judged anti-
competitive in the first case by creating barriers for competing
operating systems. But there was a difference between the two cases in
two regards, he said. =93First of all, the Commission now has more
expertise and much better resources compared to when they started
investigating Microsoft in 1993,=94 he said. =93Secondly, they have a
precedent, a court decision that confirmed the principles.=94

Other national authorities, he proposed, could join the investigation
or start their own as the competition authorities in South Korea have
done already. =93Competition authorities like company,=94 he said. And
while he did not expect the US competition authorities to join in
before the end of this term, a new government might change the
situation. Governments also could for the moment just send their
statements of concern to the EU competition commissioner.

Vinje said a slight effect on the case could result from the decision
of the ISO [International Standards Organisation] standardisation
process for Microsoft=92s OOXML software currently under discussion. The
first vote was against making OOXML a standard, but Microsoft lost
only by half a dozen votes, according to Georg Greve, president of the
Free Software Foundation.

=93Microsoft at the moment attempts to change as many nos to yes as
possible and we do it the other way round, trying to change as many
yeses to nos,=94 Greve said in Rio. The votes in the ISO standardisation
process are cast mainly by representatives of national governments,
but many governments are represented by industry associations or
private organisations. The Microsoft case showed the weaknesses of the
standardisation process, Greve said.

=93The process normally deals with technical issues, and there is not
procedure for a conflict like this,=94 he said, adding that it is a
highly politicised process.

Standards as shadow governance

Awareness-raising about the effects of standards and standardisation
processes is exactly what the IGF dynamic coalition on open standards
was all about, said Susan Struble from Sun Microsystems, which is a
member of the coalition.

=93Standards are invisible, they are shadow policy making, shadow
governance,=94 Struble said at the Rio meeting. It is necessary to learn
about standardisation and understand that there were not only a few
large standardisation bodies, but hundreds of industry consortia
engaged in this. The purpose of the coalition is to educate
governments that there is an issue and that IP and standards could
influence development.

The coalition was happy to find the standards issue mentioned by
Brazilian Minister of Science and Technology Sergio Rezende, and
Anriette Esterhuysen, chair of the Association for Progressive
Communication.

Esterhuysen said: =93Increasingly, there are standards being made
outside of public spaces that have social implications that limit what
people can do with the Internet, and the IGF needs to address this.
This touches on issues of intellectual property, and interoperability
between different applications and devices. And these are things that
impact on the cost.=94

IP and Development

The introduction of a Development Agenda at the World Intellectual
Property Organisation was applauded in Rio by both the open standards
and the access to knowledge (A2K) coalitions.

Both groups now look forward to implementation of the various measures
decided upon in the Development Agenda. =93Open standards are in,=94 said
Thiru Balasubramaniam of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI).
[Clarification: this comment referred to the WIPO Standing Committee
on Patents, but standards could appear in the Development Agenda] The
activists also are satisfied with the planned report to be delivered
by WIPO=92s committee on patents about the cost of licensing next year.

Robin Gross, executive director of IP Justice, also pointed to
implementation of the Development Agenda. =93We now can talk on meat and
potatoes,=94 she said. A proposed access to knowledge treaty mentioned
in the new agenda might take a long time, she said, yet the attention
on the issue is rising. The A2K coalition over the last year narrowed
the gap between organisations and activists working on the issue from
north and south. In Rio, the A2K coalition also presented parts of a
larger study on bilateral and regional free trade agreements
undertaken by a team under Professor Mary Wong at Franklin Pierce Law
Center (US). Concern is that more stringent IP rules may be pushed
bilaterally when they are not obtainable at the multilateral level.

Practical IP-related Results

Beside networking and some stocktaking, practical steps also were
presented by coalition members during the sessions. For instance, IP
Justice announced the first international cyberlaw clinic. Among
issues to be addressed, =93law students in the programme will tackle
Internet policy issues such as protecting free expression in the
introduction of the new top-level domains (including internationalised
domain names)=94 at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers [ICANN], and in this effort assist ICANN=92s non-commercial user
constituency. Participating law faculties are the School of Law in Rio
de Janeiro, the University of Hong Kong, the National University of
Singapore, the University of Ottawa, and the University of South Africa.

Another practical project is the start of Certified Open, a
certification service designed to evaluate technical and commercial
lock-in in technology. Certified Open will allow providers of software
or services to self-rate with regard to openness. Public authorities
(and others) then could check whether products are open standard
before buying in. While there could be abuse of the self-certification
process, made inexpensive and free for non-commercials, FSFE President
Greve said answers to the openness questions of the applicants will be
published openly allowing disputes about the information given.

A Successful Outcome?

Measuring the success of the second IGF overall was difficult. Some
pointed to the high attendance, though business again lagged behind
NGO and government representatives. Others pointed to the large number
of well-attended workshops, best practice forums and presentations of
Internet governance-related organisations, like ICANN, the country
code Top Level Domain managers, the root server zone operators, as
well as the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development. Matthew Sheers, representing the Internet
Society during the closing ceremony, pointed to the interest of some
government representatives in installing root server instances and
Internet exchange points in their countries.

The UN organisers, IGF Chair Nitin Desai and IGF Executive Coordinator
Markus Kummer, adhered to the IGF=92s non-decision-making protocol and
said at the closing press conference that there were no
recommendations or even central messages of the IGF. =93There are many
messages,=94 said Desai, =93and they come from the different workshops.=94
Desai pointed to substantive discussions about child protection on the
Internet that might help to bar jurisdiction shopping in the future.

There were appeals to not focus on issues related to ICANN, root
server and domain name system oversight so as not to lose the
opportunity to talk about an Internet bill of rights, a balanced
approach in IP, privacy and possible technological solutions for
identity management, digital education and child protection.

The IGF in some ways has taken on its own life distant from the
original fights at WSIS over the DNS. Yet there are those who still
seek resolution on the DNS issue, and they started to look outside of
the IGF. In a last minute statement, the Russian Federation claimed
that the UN secretary general should set up another working group
specifically dealing with the DNS oversight problem and the privileges
of the US government there. The secretary general=92s office, for its
part, has to decide on how to proceed with the IGF Advisory Group, the
body that is preparing and caretaking the IGF meetings. What seems
certain after Rio is that there rising hopes as to what can be reached
at the next meeting in Delhi next year.

Monika Ermert may be reached at info@ip-watch.ch.