Intellectual Property Rights and Standard-Setting Organizations

Abstract

P adopt proprietary standards.That policy has now changed.The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also recently considered changing its policy to permit proprietary Web standards, prompting a firestorm of criticism. 8Assertions by IBM and Microsoft of patents that allegedly cover ebXML and SOAP have also caused huge controversy in the Internet standards community. 9It remains to be seen whether the open nature of the Internet will survive this shift to proprietary standards, 10 but in any event the magnitude of the stakes should be clear.Whether interface standards are open or closed depends in large part on the rules standard-setting organizations adopt and how those rules are enforced.Given the importance of SSO rules that govern intellectual property rights, they have received surprisingly little treatment in the legal literature until quite recently. 11In this Article I attempt to fill that void.8