The technology marketplace is littered with competing standards, some open, others proprietary. A number of academics, both in the legal field and out, have argued that open standards are superior for both the market and consumers. They allow companies to produce products that compete on their merits, rather than their ability to play nice with other hardware or content, and they prevent consumers from being harmed by product lock-ins. A Berkeley Law professor, Robert P. Merges, has just released a working paper entitled IP Rights and Technological Platforms in which he argues that proprietary standards and the intellectual property that back them aren’t as harmful as they’re made out to be. Instead, a minor modification of IP law should be sufficient to enable a competition between open and closed standards.
