Sun’s McNealy Calls for Merger of OASIS/ISO’s ODF and China’s UOF

“I’m speaking at a couple of conferences in Beijing, the first
of which is called WTO and IPR’s: Issues in Standardization,
convened by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, China’s State
Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and Sun Microsystems, and
supported by a half dozen other Chinese Ministries, Councils and
Commissions. One of the keynote speakers today was Scott McNealy,
the Chairman of both Sun Microsystems and Sun Federal, Inc., Sun’s
government sales arm.

“The overall focus of the conference is intellectual property
rights (the IPRs in the conference title), a topic of more than
usually current interest, given that the US brought a formal
complaint against China before the World Trade Organization (the
WTO in the conference title) last week, charging China with
inadequate efforts to police infringement of IPR. Only a few days
thereafter, China enacted laws that would decrease by half the
number of copies of pirated content that would constitute ‘serious’
(from 1,000 down to 500), and from ‘very serious’ (from 5,000 to
2,500), and more significantly, dramatically increase the penalties
for doing so. Presumably each side was aware of the other’s
intended actions, so the new Chinese legislation is likely intended
more as a public refutation of US charges rather than a concession
likely to take the complaint off the WTO’s table…”

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