Indigenous standard development in the presence of dominant international standards: the case of the AVS standard in China

Abstract

Standards are ubiquitous, affecting the lives and business of citizens, companies and governments in a multitude of ways. As governments around the world realised the economic consequences stemming from standardisation, newcomers to the international standardisation arena have found themselves at a disadvantage owing to a lack of expertise and skills to contribute to the process, and the ‘barring’ strategies practiced by the keepers of the system in part as a result of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) royalties they collect from globally imposed standards. In this paper, we use the case of China's Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) to examine government positions and possible strategies for standard market competition in the presence of a dominant international standard. In our analysis, we adopt a system perspective on the Chinese government's market intervention policy.

Keywords:

• China
• Intellectual Property Rights
• government
• standard
• standardisation
• strategy
• Audio Video Coding Standard

Acknowledgements

This paper draws upon research conducted under the China EU Information Technology Standards Research Partnership. This was a support action partly funded under the European FP7 Socio-economic Sciences and the Humanities programme, topic SSH-2007-8.2 under Grant Agreement no. 217457. The authors are very grateful to Dr Diana ben-Aaron for her valuable comments. We also are grateful to anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on the manuscript.

Notes

We are thankful to the anonymous reviewer for bringing to our attention the fact that yet a different mechanism has been successfully used in the DVB project – that of ‘negative disclosure’. See Eltzroth (2008).

The term ‘inter-modal’ was originally used by Paul Edwards with reference to inter-linked infrastructures, such as the Internet, electricity grid and GPS. See Edwards (1998).

During six months in 2009 in the USA, uploads from mobile phones to YouTube grew 1700%. Since the introduction of the new iPhone 3GS alone, uploads increased by 400% a day. See http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=kbaLH7fmm-g.

When that video is free to end users, for the lifetime of that license. See http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf.