The Complementarity of Patents and Standards (c)

On April 24, 2011, ITSSD President Lawrence Kogan participated on two of three related panels of international legal experts convened at the Inter-Pacific Bar Association's 20th Annual Meeting/Conference which took place in Kyoto, Japan.   

The panels focused on and were entitled, the "Intersection of IP, Competition and International Trade — Technological Innovation, Technology Standards" .

The abridged and unabridged versions of Mr. Kogan's presentation, entitled, The Complementarity of Patents and Standards (c) are available online at the following urls:

Abridged Version

http://www.itssd.org/The%20Complementarity%20of%20Patents%20and%20Standards%20-%20Abridged%20Outline.ppt

Unabridged Version   

http://itssd.org/The%20Complementarity%20of%20Patents%20and%20Standards%20-%20Unabridged%20Outline.pdf

UK’s Promotion of Royalty-Free Government Procurement Standards - NOT AS REPORTED

http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=129510

United Kingdom: UK’s Promotion of Royalty-Free Government Procurement Standards Not as Reported

April 14, 2011

By Lawrence A. Kogan

FOSS pundits have made much ballyhoo of the recent Procurement Policy Action Note issued by the UK Cabinet Office of Government Commerce (OGC) during January 2011 that defines 'open standards' as including only those which "have intellectual property made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis" (emphasis added).¹

As an example, U.S. attorney Andy Updegrove, author of one recent article on the subject entitled,United Kingdom: U.K. Comes out for Royalty-Free Standards for Government Procurement,² waxed poetically about the UK government document's noteworthiness. To paraphrase the author's four main points, the UK government Procurement Policy Note is noteworthy because: 1) it includes informal regional as well as national standards consortia among the internationally recognized specification or standards organizations whose 'open' standards can and should be considered by the UK for government procurement purposes;2) its definition of 'open' standards constitutes a legally acceptable "repudiation" (allegedly consistent with the policy space afforded EU Member State governments vis-à-vis the European regional lawmaking institutions) of and permissible derogation from the final, binding European Interoperability Framework adopted by the European Commission during December 2010, following many years of thoughtful deliberation and contentious debate;3) it emulates and embraces a robust definition of 'open' standards that is very similar to that contained within the national interoperability framework adopted during November 2010 by the Indian Government; and 4) it proves that corporate lobbying and forum shopping undertaken at the EU Member State governmental level on behalf of the 'penguin' (open source) and 'software-as-a-service' (SaaS) industry communities can be successful, at least temporarily.

A closer examination of the UK Procurement Policy Action Note reveals that its ostensible noteworthiness and the author's observations relating to the legal and policy issues surrounding it are more nuanced than they have been depicted...