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Recent trends have shown increasing privatization of standardization activities under various corporations, trade associations, and consortia, raising significant public policy issues about how the public interest may be represented. Standardization and Digital Enclosure: The Privatization of...

This book is a study of the process of standardization—the process of establishing the technical standards that define nearly every artifact of the modern world. In the field of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)1 such standards are documents that specify everything from the prongs on plugs...

Technical standards have always played a vital role in the development of industrial society. Historically, standards can be traced to origins in the invention of currency and in early human activities such as warfare, trade and printing—in societies as diverse as ancient China and Rome. For example...

The purpose of this chapter is to situate this study in a global economic and social context, and to review the literature and discourses that inform this study and identify its objects of analysis. The discourse on enclosure, including its key concepts, is examined in some detail. The study is couched...

The primary theoretical perspective and framework of analysis for this study are public sphere theory and political economy. Although standardization is a social practice that springs from tradition and not from any theoretical grounding, it is situated and institutionalized in a public but...

The research for this work is based on the thesis that standardization is moving from public formal bodies to more private consortia. A relevant question is why? Another basic question is what do these key words mean? In any case, the approach taken in this study is analysis of historical and current...

In order to understand how traditional processes and discursive spaces may be undergoing enclosure, it is useful to examine the baseline from which recent changes have taken place. In other words, it is important to ask, How open were these standards-setting institutions and their practices in the...

The preceding chapter examined the history, structure, and practices of the principal international standards-setting organizations, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), with...

This chapter offers the conclusions of the study, briefly summarizes the entire study, and then presents the results and their relevance to the study’s theoretical perspectives. Recommendations are also provided about how the discourse on standardization might be clarified and employed more fruitfully...

This article explores the relationship between standards and business models, illustrating the conceptual linkage with reference to developments in the mobile communications industry. A case study of the DVB-H standard for mobile television shows that regardless of institutional orientation or process...

The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organisations. Here we examine the patents filed in the UMTS 3rd generation mobile phone standard, governed by the ETSI IPR policy in response to patent issues faced during the earlier GSM standardization. We contrast...

Among the hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations which develop standards there is a wide range of organizational structures, practices and policies, and levels of recognition or accreditation. But accredited and unaccredited standards organizations, commonly referred to as “SDOs” and “SSOs”...

This article gives an account of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), a standardization consortium. OMA incorporates actors both from the telecommunication and IT sector. The two sectors have different standardization traditions. OMA could have chosen a multitude of setups and work procedures, but ended up...

This article takes an axiomatic approach to determining “Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory” (“FRAND”) royalties for intellectual property (“IP”) rights. Drawing on the extensive game theory literature on “surplus sharing/cost sharing” problems, I describe specific formulas for determining...

EVENT REPORT: Recently, the ITU-T has started to increase their efforts in the field of co-operation with academia. A consultation meeting of ITU-T and representatives of numerous Universities in early 2007 concluded that one suitable way ahead would be the organisation of a series of academic...

The DVB Project is a European-based standards forum that for over 15 years has been developing specifications for digital video broadcasting, many now implemented worldwide. Its IPR policy has several novel elements. Part I of this article describes “negative disclosure,” the obligation of each member...

International standards setting organizations have different language selection policies. In this study, the ethnolinguistic background of international standardization is assessed. The language selection policies of regional and of global organizations have, besides their financial aspects, also an...

Since the late 1990’s, governments or national standards organizations have started paying increasing attention to standards education in schools and universities. Many of these initiatives were based on their education policies laid down in a national standards strategy. This paper explores the common...

This article presents the history, current state, and directions of research and implementation of open information system technologies in the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since 1993 when work on the systematized application of open systems principles was initiated by the Russian Academy of Sciences, a...