Microsoft’s conduct over the last two decades has demonstrated Microsoft’s willingness and ability to engage in unlawful conduct to protect and extend its core monopolies. This conduct has caused real harm to consumers, who continue to pay high prices and use lower quality products than would have prevailed in a competitive market. This paper aims to help developers, consumer groups, and government authorities better to understand Microsoft’s history of anticompetitive conduct and to recognise its current and future misconduct at an early stage in order to intervene to prevent Microsoft from using tactics other than competition on the merits. For more information click here.
The European Committee for Interoperable Systems was founded in Brussels in 1989. It played an important role in securing provisions benefitting interoperability provisions in the 1991 Software Copyright Directive, and numerous intellectual property initiatives since at European and international level. ECIS Chairman Simon Awde was already present in the early days of ECIS representing what was then Amdahl (since acquired by Fujitsu). He notes: “Much has changed since the founding of ECIS, except what ECIS stands for.”
ECIS submitted comments to the European Commission on the Community patent and EU patent judiciary system. As ECIS points out in its comments, a Community patent system worth adopting must be balanced, ensure high quality patents and judicial decisions, and be reliable and ensure legal certainty to all interested parties. PDF download.
In its comments on the Communication from the European Commission about “An Industrial Property Rights Strategy for Europe” ECIS calls on the EU to guard against increasing intellectual property protection as a purpose in and of itself as opposed to a means to an end, namely increased innovation and greater welfare for society. More here.
In its comments submitted to the European Commission, ECIS notes that EIF 2.0, if adopted and implemented, would make a significant contribution to encouraging openness and genuine interoperability across borders and software applications used in European eGovernment. The Draft recognises interoperability as a key means to promote efficient pan-European Government Services
(“PEGS”). ECIS supports these goals and encourages the Commission to adopt EIF v2.0 as a mechanism to achieve them. For more click here.