According to your experience, which technologies suffer the most from the lack of fair and equitable IPR regimes, discriminating fair competition at international level?

Free software is often developed on a very small budget, or no budget at all, and is severely hampered by any IPR licensing except free licensing for any implementation of a standard. The notion "fair and equitable" when applied to free software development translates to "free and without restrictions". This is not properly addressed at the moment, and many free software projects have been forced to invent around standards with non-free patent licensing schemes. See what happened to mp3 and ogg, for example. In some respects, ogg was admittedly better than mp3 when it first appeared, but it would have been better to spend that development effort on improving the mp3 format instead. There are many other examples to be found where free software has been forced to re-invent the wheel, sometimes making it less round than it could have been, because of a too restricted licensing scheme for so-called IPR.

Fair competition in software development is not all about balancing commercial interests against each other. It is also about enabling free software development. It would be very nice to see this being addressed better in future legislation and future standards.

Regarding which specific technologies suffer the most, I think that many current problems are indeed focused around file formats for media and documents, like the main subject of this site. Never before in history has the very access to legally acquired information been subject to IPR restrictions. Copyright law can suddenly be arbitrarily amended by IPR restrictions on data storage formats, and that can place a different and very strong restriction on the availability and fair and equitable use of information. I don't think this is what humanity needs to go forward from here.

So what's the news. The European Union DG InfoSoc reaches out and has some questions on standard policy as well.² Some of them could be of your concern, e.g.:

a) Do you support the Commission view that the issue of divergent standards could be alleviated if more emphasis was put on international pre-competitive industrial research collaboration? What concrete actions could help in encouraging third countries' decision makers to facilitate their industries' international cooperation in view of developing new standards? Which countries/regions should be given priority and which areas of standardisation should be addressed?
b) The Commission is undertaking initiatives for proactive standard marketing promotion in third countries. What would be your priorities related to standards promotion? On which countries/regions these initiatives should be focused? What would be the respective responsibilities of the Commission and the Member States in this field?
c) Has your organisation been involved in processes which resulted in adopting common standards? How could the Commission support the participation of European industry in these processes?
d) How would you assess the impact of those EU research projects whose objective was to “disseminate” an EU standard?

…

a) What should be the modalities for an EU action in IPRs licensing of key technologies in the context of international co-operation?
b) What are the incentives that should be put in place and/or supported at EU-level, in order to facilitate IPR patenting and licensing efforts, particularly from SMEs and start-ups?
c) According to your experience, which technologies suffer the most from the lack of fair and equitable IPR regimes, discriminating fair competition at international level?

…and many other issues such as RFID. Deadline for your submissions or comments to the European Commission is Sept 29.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/itemlongdetail.cfm?item_id=3475

You still don't see the relation to OOXML? Well, some persons were aware of OOXML's brokenness as of October or earlier. In January we wrote a letter and asked the standard bodies not to chose the fast-track. It was a kind of drive-by writing. Alberto is a great document format expert and knew very much about OOXML. We are pleased to see that confirmed by so many standard bodies. OOXML was not ready as a "standard".

It always saves a whole lot of time to start activities in early stages. But in early stages of a debate no one is alerted except those people who observe it professionally (and FFII infomaniacs). It requires great efforts to stop or redirect a running train. I wonder if I should start to hate ECMA for how much of your precious time they consume with their standard process, a standard proposal set on the wrong track.

"While a certain number of errors is understandable in any large specification, the sheer volume of errors indicates that the specification has not been through a rigorous technical review before becoming an Ecma standard, and therefore may not be suitable for the fast-track process." (http://surguy.net/articles/ooxml-validation-and-technical-review.xml)

The best thing for contributors to do is to adopt an issue of public ICT policy no one else cares about and that is in an infant stage. The EU consultation is one of the potential activities but there are so many of them. Someone needs to care and save others a whole lot of their precious time or ensure real benefit. I am not running out of important issues, there are just far to many of them.