http://web.archive.org/web/20060526222304/www.no-lobbyists-as-such.com/florian-mueller-blog/ecis/

Microsoft EU anti-trust case: Where’s the E in ECIS?

At a two-day hearing in Brussels at which Microsoft presented its arguments in the EU anti-trust case, one “interested party” to support the Commission’s action against MSFT was ECIS, the “European Committee for Interoperable Systems”. This misnomer exemplifies an approach to lobbying that is very popular in the EU: everything is called European even when it is not. Similarly, a number of organizations claim to be part of “civil society” and pretend to represent “SMEs” (small and medium-sized enterprises).

So how European is ECIS? According to a page on its Web site, its members include Corel, IBM, Linspire, Nokia, Opera, Oracle, RealNetworks, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Only one of the aforementioned companies is headquartered in the EU (Nokia, in Finland), and another one of them - Opera - is a non-EU but European company (Norwegian to be precise). Granted, all of those companies do business here (not sure about Linspire, but I guess so). Still, I think the E in ECIS isn’t justified. In reality, this is a mostly American group of companies that only have one thing in common: a dislike for Microsoft.

Members of ECIS stress that an open standard has the following characteristics:

[…]

• Available royalty-free or on a FRAND basis that does not discriminate against the open source software development or licensing model.[3]

(The level of royalties is highly dependent on the specific policy context and ECIS refers to its response to recommendaton 10, regarding lack of guidance on what FRAND should be taken to mean in terms of appropriate levels of royalty. ECIS additionally wishes to point out that there is significant use of royalty-free IPR licensing in software standardization.)

This sounds like a reasonable and discriminatory compromise towards shareware or proprietary freeware, no?

There are also some comments by other associations such as EICTA:

EICTA does not have definitive and complete views on IPR policy matters in standardisation and, considering the other objectives of the Commission through this study, welcomes the Commission's intention not to put IPR policy matters into the focus of this study on ICT standardisation in Europe, or to make any policy recommendations in the field of IPR in this context, especially based on the first
interim report.

EICTA generally welcomes the support of the European Commission to help SDOs discuss and establish clear IPR rules for use of IPRs in standards.

There are also some comments from ANEC, the European consumer voice in standardisation:

In addition to the above, the sources on this topic quoted in the study refer exclusively to participation of SMEs in standardisation, not consumers. Of course, when we refer to the participation of consumers in standardisation this should refer to the organised participation of consumers, both at the national or European levels. In this context, reference to individual consumer participation is out of scope.