From the Standards Blog | Rambus Ruling Overturned: A Legal Dispute of Dickensian Proportions Lurches On The one great principle of the English law is, to make business for itself. There is no other principle distinctly, certainly, and consistently maintained through all its narrow turnings. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
According to John the Apostle, the poor will be always with us. So too, it seems, will the never-ending skein of cases enmeshing Rambus, Inc., the brash memory design company that famously participated in a JEDEC standard setting process in the early 1990s, and later asserted various patent claims against implementers of the very standards created by the working group in which it participated. And while the lawyers may not be to blame in this case (or more properly, these many cases), the flood of litigation involving more than a half a dozen different vendors and government agencies certainly rivals the worst that Jarndyce ever threw against Jarndyce in Charles Dickens' epic tale of litigation gone wild.
The latest turning of the screw was announced this Tuesday, when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a unanimous ruling by the five Commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (who had, in their own turn, earlier overturned the decision of an FTC Administrative Law Judge, who had reached a similar result to the Federal Circuit, which had itself earlier overturned the verdict of a trial court that...well, you get the idea). In a related decision, the FTC had capped the royalties that Rambus could require implementers of the standards to pay. Now that Jill, too, will go tumbling down after the Jack that fell to the Appeals Court's reinterpretation of the law.
The long and the short of the latest decision is that the Court of Appeals disagreed with the FTC's conclusion that Rambus's activities in JEDEC constituted a violation of antitrust law, and also questioned whether the Commissioners had properly concluded that Rambus had violated JEDEC's patent disclosure policy. Summarizing and oversimplifying a complex analysis, the FTC had based its conclusions on the assumption that if Rambus had disclosed its patentable inventions in timely fashion, JEDEC would have either chosen another, non-infringing option, or would have required Rambus (under its standing rules) to pledge to make patent licenses available on reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) terms. The higher court held that under existing precedents, both of these alternatives would need to result in a violation of antitrust laws in order for Rambus to be held accountable .
Fortunately for Rambus, the court held that engaging in deceptive conduct to avoid the latter alternative would not violate anticompetition law, even where the result was to create monopoly power. Or, in the more formalistic language of the Court, "the FTC failed to demonstrate that Rambus's conduct was exclusionary under settled principles of antitrust law"....Full Story
|
US warns China of 'technological isolation' Sydney Morning Herald May 10, 2008 The United States warned China Thursday that it risked "technological isolation" for developing unique technical standards of its own that also are shutting out foreign competition.
Despite widely accepted international standards, China developed standards mandated by government regulations amid a lack of transparency and due process, said Under Secretary of Commerce Christopher Padilla....
Many American companies have expressed concern about security standards for information technology products that made it costly for them to enter the Chinese market, said Padilla, who is policy chief for international commerce. ...Full Story
OGC and buildingSMART Alliance Issue CFP/RFQ for AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed Staff
Open Geospatial Consortium May 9, 2008 Staff, OGC Announcement
The buildingSMART alliance, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)
and Sponsors of the AECOO (Architecture, Engineering, Construction,
Owner and Operator) Testbed have today issued a Request for Quotation
(RFQ) and Call for Participation (CFP) for the AECOO-Phase 1 Testbed.
The testbed aims to foster business transformation as defined in the
United States National Building Information Modeling Standard, Part 1
(NBIMS) with technology for interoperability involving intelligent
building models with 3D geometric capabilities....
The initiative is based upon principles of 'Open Standardization' --
[being] "the reason for the success of the Internet, the World Wide
Web, e-Commerce, and the wireless revolution." The reason is simple:
our world is going through a communications revolution on top of a
computing revolution. In the context of this OGC initiative, Open
standardization means 'agreeing on a common definitions of terms and
names, attributes and properties of information.' At the fundamental
levels this type of open standardization has been developed by: (1)
buildingSMART International: IFC and IFD; (2) Associated General
Contractors with buildingSMART alliance: AGCxml; (3) International
Code Council: SmartCodes; (4) Construction Specification Institute:
OmniClass... Open standardization also means agreeing on common
means for communication — the actions of 'transmitting or
exchanging through a common system of symbols, signs or behavior
concerning that information and how it needs to be delivered,
presented or made capable'. ...Full Story
The 'User Experience' of Warnings in the Emergency Alert System (EAS) Art Botterell
blog (courtesy of Robin Cover/XML Daily Newslink) May 9, 2008 "In the runup to the May 19, 2008 Emergency Alert System (EAS) Showdown
[Summit] in Washington, DC, most of the discussion has focused on the
nuts and bolts of moving the nation's broadcast alerts across digital
networks based on CAP. But CAP only defines the information 'payload'
of a warning. It doesn't specify how that information should be
presented over HD radio, digital TV, computers, PDAs, digital signage
or any of our various other windows into the infosphere. This is going
to become a crucial question in the very near future, I think. As
digitization drives broadcast content onto ever more diverse platforms
we're going to need to give these presentation/user interface issues as
much attention as we have to transport/relay-network design. ...Full Story
New DO-254 Industry Group Consortium Just Launched Press Release
PRLeap.com May 9, 2008 The world’s first and only dedicated DO-254 industry group consortium has been launched world wide. Rising from inception to the defacto critical avionics hardware standard in just six years, DO-254 certification is now a prerequisite for virtually all airborne hardware and systems.
Now, avionics hardware DO254 developers, suppliers, and manufacturers have a one-stop central repository for D0-254 facts, DO-254 whitepapers, DO-254 Engineers & DERs, and DO-254 certified or compliant products at www.do254.info. ...Full Story
Microsoft DAISY XML Add-In and DAISY Pipeline Support Accessibility Staff
Microsoft May 9, 2008 Microsoft Corp. has joined with industry and advocacy group leaders
worldwide to launch new software that will make it easier for anyone
to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind
and print-disabled individuals. The new 'Save as DAISY XML' add-in,
designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, allows
users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY XML, the foundation
of the globally accepted DAISY Standard for reading and publishing
navigable multimedia content. The add-in was created through an open
source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital
Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded
by Microsoft Office Word users for free. ...Full Story
Google: Unicode Conquers ASCII on the Web Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com May 8, 2008 ...Unicode
has overtaken ASCII as the most popular character encoding scheme on
the World Wide Web, [according to Mark Davis, Google's senior
international software architect]. Also vanquished at almost exactly
the same time was the Western European encoding. Unicode is a character
encoding standard that gracefully accommodates dozens of languages as
well as Roman characters with diacritical marks. ASCII, a tried-and true,
decades-old standard, is limited to 128 or 256 characters and has a hard
time extending beyond the range of a century-old Remington typewriter.
Google's a fan of Unicode Web sites. When it processes data from Web
sites, it converts it into Unicode first if it's not already there. That
improves international search abilities. ...Full Story
Working group to define mobile memory Press Release
ElectronicsTalk.com May 8, 2008 ARM, Hynix Semiconductor, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Silicon Image, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications and STMicroelectronics have set up a working group to specify an open standard for next-generation memory interface technology targeting mobile devices This first-of-its-kind memory standard for dynamic random access memory (DRAM), named Serial Port Memory Technology (SPMT), will enable extended battery life, bandwidth flexibility, significantly reduced pin count, lower power demand and multiple ports by using a serial interface instead of the parallel interface commonly used in today's memory devices...The SPMT Working Group has been meeting since the third quarter of 2007 and is expected to organise a formal consortium later this year consisting of handset, memory and system-on-chip manufacturers and semiconductor IP providers with the intention of bringing the SPMT specification to the industry by the end of 2008. ...Full Story
ITU TELECOM AFRICA focuses on a continent at a crossroads Press Release
ITU May 8, 2008 Geneva — ITU TELECOM AFRICA kicks off with the launch of ITU’s African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report, which is an invaluable information tool to inform and guide policy-makers, investors, analysts and other observers of Africa’s telecommunications landscape. It contains an extensive overview of key sector developments, and includes a number of recommendations to sustain growth and deepen access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the region.
In addition to the analytical section, the report includes 21 regional tables covering key telecommunication/ICT indicators (2006/2007 data), 53 individual country pages with a five year profile from 2003-2007, and a directory of telecommunication ministries, regulators and operators in the region.
Press Release
International Telecommunication Union
For immediate release Telephone: +41 22 730 6039
Telefax: +41 22 730 5933
E-mail: pressinfo
ITU TELECOM AFRICA focuses on a continent at a crossroads
ITU's African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report to be launched in Cairo
ACCREDIT NOW
Geneva, 5 May 2008 — ITU TELECOM AFRICA kicks off with the launch of ITU’s African Telecommunication / ICT Indicators 2008 report, which is an invaluable information tool to inform and guide policy-makers, investors, analysts and other observers of Africa’s telecommunications landscape. It contains an extensive overview of key sector developments, and includes a number of recommendations to sustain growth and deepen access to information and communication technologies (ICT) in the region.
Africa marks unprecedented growth in mobile sector
Growth in Africa’s mobile sector has defied all predictions. Africa remains the region with the highest annual growth rate in mobile subscribers and added no less than 65 million new subscribers during 2007. At the beginning of 2008, there were over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers on the continent. ...Full Story
OpenOffice.org 3 beta is ready for testing John McCreesh
OpenOffice.org May 7, 2008 The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that the public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This beta release is
made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next
major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production
use at this stage....Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming
OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files
created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx,
.xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for
the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html ...Full Story
Adobe and Industry Leaders Establish Open Screen Project Press Release
Adobe May 7, 2008 For immediate release
Technology and Content Innovators to Drive Consistent Rich Internet Experiences Across Multiple Screens
SAN JOSE, Calif. — May 1, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the Open Screen Project, supported by a group of industry leaders, including ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless. The project is dedicated to driving rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. Also supporting the Open Screen Project are leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to reliably deliver rich Web and video experiences live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment -- taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ -- that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and devices, including phones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by enabling the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment is intended to provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers. ...Full Story
|