Standards, Interoperability and Intellectual Property Rights

Jim DeLong, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Property

3/22/2008
(Original Publish Date: 1/17/2006)

A fundamental reality of the tech world is that companies have become increasingly specialized, with each building only a small chunk of any functionality that is needed by consumers. So their products must interact with each other, but without the discipline imposed by common ownership and management. This brings us to the concept of standards, the term given to the mechanisms by which the different participants in a market communicate, coordinate, and cooperate. The word has a number of meanings -- units of weights and measures are standards, for example -- but in the tech context it usually means a specification for organizing and transmitting information.