Agenda

1/ Open source vulnerable to patents

This refers to the statement of FSFE. There is a long standing complaint of OSS folks. But other than calling for RF, I have not seen any proposed solution in the political debate. I heard from a friend that the law could make the end-user subject to patent payments, not the developer of the OSS. That could be an innovative idea on how to tackle this issue.

2/ recognition of fora (Directive 98/34)

This was one of the central issues of the DG Enterprise study. There are two possible solutions:

a/ Add the most important consortia to the list in Directive 98/34 Annex 1 and thus give them some ESO status

b/ Develop criteria of openness for the inclusion of standards from the 600+ consortia in existence.

3/ disclosure requirements

Disclosure is a double edged sword. On the one hand, it avoids being trapped. On the other hand, it may create tons of legal FUD. FUD is sometimes as effective in holding up work than a real patent would be. So when to disclose and when not to disclose?

4/ ex ante (Undheim/Heiske)

At the IPR workshop of DG Enterprise, there was a large discussion about ex ante. The discussion mentioned a lot of litigation going on at the moment involving mostly the mobile world. I would like to see a preliminary e-mail discussion between Trond Undheim and Harald Heiske (others are encouraged to weigh in) whether "ex-ante pricing" is a criteria for openness of a standard or just a customer - demand of standard consumers. Who are the standard consumers? IT-Industry? end-users?

I note that W3C has no ex ante discussion as RF makes that obsolete. RF is some kind of ex ante promise in itself.

5/ agreement and emphasis on what works?

Harald Heiske makes a good point: We should not only state negative things. We should also say what works and should NOT be changed. I would like to receive feedback on this point from all of you.

6/ low participation of industry in standardization initiatives

Minutes

It is noted that all participants refused to take minutes. The Michel Lacroix from the Commission helped the Moderator out.

Present:

  1. Erwin Tenhumberg (SAP)
  2. Bernhard Fischer (SAP)
  3. Lars Pedersen (EC)
  4. Michel Lacroix (EC - Minutes)
  5. Francisco Mingorance (BSA)
  6. Bernd Geiger (Venture Capital Group)
  7. Ute Decker (BSA)
  8. Georg Greve (FSFE)
  9. Rigo Wenning (Moderator - W3C)
  10. Trond Undheim (OFE)
  11. Mike Engelhardt (Adobe)
  12. Earl Nied (Intel)
  13. Franz Kudorfer (NESSI)
  14. Siada El Ramly (EAS)
  15. Harald Heiske (Siemens)

Excused:

  1. Tom Brookes (Apple)
  2. Shane Coughlan
  3. Jonathan Sage
  4. Mar Duque
  5. Jonathan Zuck
  6. Heymans Xavier

The set of issues handled by the group will be closed by Fri 27 Feb noon. After that, proposals will only be about refining the issues.

Rigo will produce a first draft of those issues by Fri 27 eob.

A new conference call has to be convened as early as possible next week for reviewing that draft.

The issues do not need to be fully blown, when existing documents explaining them exist, references will be provided to them.

Trends: when we have a reduced (core?) set of issues, they will hopefully lend themselves to be prioritised along trends.

The final document will reflect areas of broad consensus, while recording objections or different views. In any case, there will be a last call for comments before the document is submitted to the Commission by the moderator of the WG.