STANDARDS WARS

Strategies for extracting value from IPR can range from seeking monopoly power, to passing laws prohibiting such conduct, to simply giving it away.

If terrible events have any value at all, it may be that they act as examples that help to prevent their repetition. The occasional all-out de facto standards wars reminds us that such a high risk strategy really can be MAD.

While some standard wars are destructive, others can better be seen as competitive contests in emerging network-dependent technologies. And, as in the real world, there are not only wars, but lesser conflicts and escalations as well, each of which can represent a messy, but ultimately effective path to reaching consensus.

Achieving "openness" is usually the result of standards development rather than legislation. Last week, however, the French legislature passed a law making the use of digital rights management (DRM) technology illegal in the music industry. The law was directed squarely at Apple's wildly successful iTunes business, but if the concept catches on, why would such laws be limited only to ...

The open source software development concept can seem radical and revolutionary - until one compares it to familiar processes such as academic scholarship, legislation and the court system, each of which creates intellectual property, makes it available to all for free, and encourages reuse and further innovation. Its therefore not surprising that "open IPR" concepts are spreading to areas beyond ...