Open Standards and Patents - A Start-up Perspective
Mikko Välimäki, is CEO of Tuxera Ltd, adjunct professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
What is an open standard and what does it mean when a standard has an increasing number of patents? What are the implications of patenting to IT commodification trends such as open source software? This talk will discuss the inner meaning of the politically hot term "open standard" and the practical implications of having more and more patents in information technology standards from low-level algorithms to high-level functionality. The speaker's main argument is that commodification meets its limits with increasing patenting, that has already put a price tag on open source. As a positive note, nobody should be scared as every intellectual property problem is solvable and also start-ups continue to enter the markets like before. The word "open" just will not equal to free. The talk draws from practical examples in European policy debates where the speaker has participated both as an academic discussant and more recently as the CEO of Tuxera, a company providing Microsoft Windows interoperable file system software solutions on Linux both as open source and proprietary versions.
About Mikko
Mikko Välimäki, is CEO of Tuxera Ltd. Previously he has lead his own law firm and several software start-up companies, including one that developed a highly-popular graphical user interface for MySQL databases. Mr. Välimäki is also an adjunct professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, and a research fellow at University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. He has lectured in numerous universities and published four books on software licensing, copyright, patents and related topics. Mr. Välimäki has LL.M. from the University of Helsinki and Ph.D from the Helsinki University of Technology. His university website is at http://www.valimaki.org/
Links
Download media from this event here.