Baker & McKenzie Paper On OpenXML IP Rights, Reviews Broader Industry Approach
29 January 2008 by oliverThose who were present for the second half of the event that the University Of New South Wales CyberLaw centre organized late last year to look at OpenXML technical and legal questions will remember Steve Mutkoski’s presentation comparing the language in the Open Specification Promise with the OpenDocument Patent Statement from Sun Microsystems, Interoperability Specification Pledge issued by IBM.
As a complement to that conversation Baker & McKenzie have posted a paper entitled “Standardisation and Licensing of Microsoft’s Office Open XML File Formats“;
This paper was commissioned by Microsoft and seeks to address and clarify any misunderstandings in the industry, and among the wider general public, about both the standardisation process that Microsoft has embarked upon in respect of its Office Open XML Reference Schema, as well as the legal arrangements governing the use of the Schema by others.
From the document;
The following discussion examines both the CNS and OSP and compares them to similar instruments issued by Sun and IBM in connection with document format standards. What the comparison demonstrates is that all four instruments adopt broadly similar approaches to address certain common issues.The full text of all of these instruments is annexed to this note.
As I have mentioned before, this type of licensing is extremely important to the industry as a whole, providing a mechanism for any developer to be able to implement a specification without having to deal with original patent or rights holders.
You can download the paper from here.
29 January 2008, on 5:06 am
No one knows if the OSP is applicable on a worldwide scale and grants sufficient permissions. It is nice to get a better paper of Baker&McKenzie than the previous one, but still it does not answer the most important questions (validity and scope) and does not use analytical methods according to legal professional standards but epical explanations.
29 January 2008, on 8:48 am
That is a convincing sounding statment Andre, doesn’t it apply equally to any contract ever written, by anybody, anywhere?
What you write sounds alarming to a technologist,our world is binary, however what you describe is the bounds that every lawyer operates in every day.
The OSP, like the grants from Sun and IBM, covers many specs today. Those protocols, specifcations and standards are in use in a range of different projects, some of which I suspect you already use. The OSP itself was welcomed when we first introduced it by a number of well respected lawyers, both in the open source community and elsewhere. At the same time, as the Baker report shows, the language used in the OSP is very similar to langage used in similar grants by other companies.