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  • From: "Ian Thomson" <ithomson.nz AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion" <cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Cc-nz] Fwd: [PICISOC] Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF : IP Watch report
  • Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:52:50 +1300

Hi All,

An interesting view on recent discussions at the IGF re open standards and IP

Ian

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mark Perkins lists <lists AT markperkins.info>
Date: 20 Nov 2007 01:06
Subject: [PICISOC] Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF : IP Watch report
To: Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society Discussion List < picisoc AT picisoc.org>

Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF
http://ip-watch.org/weblog/wp-trackback.php?p=828
posted by William New @ 12:44 pm / 19 November 2007

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. "IP issues of course are always an
important issue," said Gross, the US coordinator for international
communications and information policy. "But 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." 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. "Although the
digital age holds great promise for educators and learners, information
policy and regulation has not sufficiently focused on the unique context of
education," 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's 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's operating systems. "You may have experienced that sometimes open
office documents can be received by Microsoft users, sometimes not."

Second, for email and collaboration software Microsoft also may have
privileged their own products like Outlook with regard to interfacing with
Microsoft's 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's platform
for web applications software development. "It is a sort of an effort to
'proprietise' the Internet," said Vinje.

He saw this as "the same kind of behaviour" 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. "First of all, the Commission now has more expertise and
much better resources compared to when they started investigating Microsoft
in 1993," he said. "Secondly, they have a precedent, a court decision that
confirmed the principles."

Other national authorities, he proposed, could join the investigation or
start their own as the competition authorities in South Korea have done
already. "Competition authorities like company," 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's 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.

"Microsoft 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,"
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.

"The process normally deals with technical issues, and there is not
procedure for a conflict like this," 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.

"Standards are invisible, they are shadow policy making, shadow governance,"
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: "Increasingly, 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."

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. "Open standards are in," said Thiru
Balasubramaniam of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI). The activists also
are satisfied with the planned report to be delivered by WIPO's 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. "We now can talk on meat and
potatoes," 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, "law
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)" at the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers [ICANN], and in this effort assist ICANN's
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's non-decision-making protocol and said at
the closing press conference that there were no recommendations or even
central messages of the IGF. "There are many messages," said Desai, "and
they come from the different workshops." 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's 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 AT ip-watch.ch .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All of the news
articles and features on Intellectual Property Watch are also subject to a
Creative Commons License which makes them available for widescale, free,
non-commercial reproduction and translation.
----
Mark Perkins MLIS, MCLIP
www.markperkins.info

https://keyserver.pgp.com/



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Ian Thomson
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  • [Cc-nz] Fwd: [PICISOC] Open Standards, Access To Knowledge Discussed At IGF : IP Watch report, Ian Thomson, 11/20/2007

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