Corporate COunsel Forum

Standards Wars

Wednesday 26 November 2008

Standards are the essence of our increasingly open, collaborative technology world; and tomorrow’s battles for market position are often won in today’s meetings at the standard setting bodies (SSBs). In a web 2.0 universe where convergence of content, transmission and terminals is happening on an epic scale, establishing a standard API, protocol, software or other technology interface is a, perhaps the, key driver to market positioning.

At this session, Susannah Sheppard provided a practical guide for business through the competition issues that arise within the standards maze. Using publicly available case studies from the policies and rulebooks of well known SSBs, this session provided guidance on how to weigh the balance between contributing and retaining IP rights in the standard setting context; and how to manage at SSB and in the market place the competition law issues that potentially bedevil this area.

Materials from the event are listed below:

Standards Wars - Presentation
(Susannah Sheppard, head of Competition and Regulatory at Kemp Little LLP)
(For Mozilla Firefox browser users, please right-click and select 'Open Link in IE tab' to view the presentation)

Case study:

Standards Wars (pdf)