Wednesday morning, 23 June 2010 Alan Bryden, the former ISO general secretary who let it happen and made European standard setting organisations a laughing stock of an US corporation, would speak about "European standardisation in a global environment" in the European Parliament "Internal Market and Consumer protection (IMCO) committee.
Bryden was also a member of the Commission's EXPRESS "expert panel" group on the future of European Standardisation which report advises for strong IPR policies against open standardization. The IMCO meeting relates to the Parliament phase of the EXPRESS process and the Future of European Standardisation. Read what the winding lobby snakes write in their report to actually promote standards locked down by software patents:
European standards are developed in an open process, and there are uniform, nondiscriminatory conditions for their development as well as for their sale or distribution. The implications of IPRs relevant to a standard need to be visible to the standards developers during the standardization process. Cooperation should further be improved between the standards bodies and the European Patent Office to ensure that issues where there is an interaction are visible at an early stage, as this would lead to an improved quality of patents and standards. In this context, ETSI has established cooperation with the European Patent Office and recently signed an MoU, thus institutionally confirming their commitment to deepen their established cooperation.
It is important that standards organizations continue to ensure innovation-friendly policies including a balance between the interests of the users of standards and the rights of owners of intellectual property as almost all standards bodies do today.
Such a balance may take into account differences regarding the areas of standardisation, according to the consensus of the stakeholders involved. … Such a balance needs to also consider the requirement to continue incentives to innovate in technical areas subject to standardization.
Standards bodies are encouraged to assess their IPR policies with a focus on promoting innovation.
In the Guidelines for cooperation between the EC, EFTA and the ESOs, the ESOs have committed to ensure that standards can be used by the market operators. The objective is to ensure licences for any essential IPRs contained in standards are provided on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions (FRAND). In practice, in the large majority of cases, patented technology has been successfully integrated into standards under this approach. On this basis, standards bodies are encouraged to strive for improvements to the FRAND system taking into consideration issues that occur over time.
The Consumer Committee manages to hold a hearing with the opponents of consumer-friendly ict standards policy. Despite some placeholder organisations no real consumer groups and no sme representatives are involved.