U.S. Information Technology Office

USITO Work Group Meeting on SAC Draft Regulation

USITO's Standards and Conformity Assessment Work Group held a meeting in the afternoon of November 11 Wednesday to discuss the newly released draft rule on standardization work that involves patent issues.

On November 2, 2009, the Standardization Administration of China (SAC) issued a notice in its website, inviting comments to the "Interim Provisions on Formulation and Revision of Patent-related National Standards"(Please click here for Chinese, Membes click here for updated USITO translation). The notice states, SAC welcomes industry comments to the Rules, with an aim to "fairly handle the issue of patents involved in national standards, regulate the process in coping with patents when formuting standards, encourage indigenous innovation", etc. The deadline for submitting comments is November 30.

Fourteen USITO member companies joined the work group meeting, in which they widely exchanged views and compared notes about the issue. Moderated by work group chair Terry Zhang, the meeting drilled down the draft regulation by going over the terms article by article, and garnered valuable ideas from each participants. The work group reached consensus to deliver USITO comments to SAC in the last week of this month, with the initial draft to be ready within ten days.

USITO Notes: This issue has long attracted great attention from USITO member companies with operations in China. Actually SAC issued the first draft of this regulation as early as 2003, when USITO had organized its members comments and submitted a letter of comments in 2004 (members please click here to download the 2004 USITO final submission in Chinese). Thanks to the industry outcry, SAC decided to postpone the drafting work until recently. Because of a growing number of cases involving standards-patents conflict has emerged in recent years, according to experts, the judicial systems are thirsty for applicable terms in handling the cases, which prompted the standardization authorities to pick up the issue again.

We have prepared a brief notes for our Nov.11 work group meeting, since it was a small-scale member initiated meeting, so notes will not be downloadable in our website. Members please send an email to JingL@usito.org if you are interested, and we'll send it to you after we check with the meeting initiators. For additional points not covered in the meeting notes, please send us an email.

As covered in our last weekly newsletter, the Chinese standardization efforts are dominated by the government, unlike western countries (industry leads), so the government may take actions on involved patent issues that are hardly acceptable to the industry. As standards are for public use while patent is basically private, it is always a challenge to fix their relations especially in China. Members please stay tuned for our first draft letter of comments.

USITO Exchanges with EU Delegation on Infosec Issue

On October 30, USITO met with the visiting European Union DG Enterprise group in EU Delegation China Office, where both parties exchanged views on China's information security issues. The EU side was attended by EU Delegation representative, EC policy officer, etc. Some company representatives invited by EU side were also present in the meeting. Theme of the meeting was EU delegation's briefing on their meeting turnouts with Chinese government bodies on infosec topic in the past few days. Members please click here for the meeting report.

USITO Board Meeting To Take Place November 19, 2009

USITO is scheduled to host the next Board Meeting in Beijing on November 19, 2009. So far most of USITO's board members have registered to attend the meeting. We would like to welcome our member company representatives to raise their issues or ideas to our board directors for discussion in the board meeting. The whole day meeting, as previous meetings did, will review and discuss a variety of policy issues, USITO operations, as well as the strategies to more effectively bridging U.S.-China ICT industries. For any questions regarding the meeting, please contact wenjie@usito.org.

Member in the News: Hopes ride high on Windows 7

The release of the next generation of the Windows operating system has created a carnival atmosphere in the IT industry - with long queues at the door, cheers and whistles, and an air of anticipation at the Beijing 798 Art Zone show, where Windows 7 was the star attraction. The applause from Intel, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Dell representatives, along with others from software, Internet, personal computer, chip and hardware companies was audible. Detail

Knowledge Center: Carriers' Mobile Phone Application Stores

A brief analysis by CCID consulting on the market landscape of the mobile phone application stores. Member Download