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On Thursday I reported that Brazil had filed an appeal of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 approval of Microsoft’s OOXML specification, including the text of that appeal, with it’s many charges of irregularities. The Brazil appeal followed on the heals of the earlier appeal by SABS, the National Body of South Africa.

Thursday of this week marked the deadline for filing additional appeals to the adoption of OOXML by ISO/IEC JTC 1, and on Friday morning a spokesman for the IEC acknowledged the receipt of a total of three appeals by the deadline, with the third and final appeal being filed by India, as reported by Peter Sayers, of the IDG News Service. I have no news as yet whether the fourth country that planned to file an appeal has decided not to do so, missed the deadline, or sent its letter only to ISO (Peter reports that an ISO spokesman declined to confirm how many appeals it has received at this time. The deadline date is a matter of some confusion, as some National Bodies were under the impression that the deadline was June 2, so it remains possible that a fourth appeal will (or already has been) received.

In other technicality news, the IEC spokesman noted that the Brazil letter had been improperly addressed - duplicate copies should have been sent to the CEOs of both the IEC and ISO - but that this technical irregularity would be waived [Jonathan Buck, the IEC spokesman, inaccurately stated to Peter that the Indian appeal, rather than the Brazilian appeal, had been improperly addressed; the IDG story will be corrected shortly]

More substantively, what happens next? Ironically, “what happens next” is described in the same general and sometimes vague Directives that have caused ongoing dissent in the process to date, and figure prominently in the South African and Brazilian appeals themselves.

According to Jonathan Buck, the IEC spokesman, the CEOs of the two organizations are charged with trying to reach a solution with each of the National Bodies that have filed appeals. If that fails after one month of effort, then the issue is transferred to two committees, one in each of the two sponsoring organization of Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1). They are the Technical Management Board (at ISO) and the Standards Management Board (at the IEC).

Here’s how the actual rules under the Directives for handling appeals describe the process:

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• Andy Updegrove

  

  Andy Updegrove is a partner and founder of Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a Boston-based technology law firm, and has represented and helped structure more than 80 worldwide standard setting, open source, promotional and advocacy consortia over the past 20 years. He has also represented hundreds of both emerging as well as established technology companies, and is the founder and editor of both the popular website http://www.consortiuminfo.org and the widely-read Standards Blog

• Karen Copenhaver

  

  Karen Copenhaver is a partner in Choate, Hall & Stewart LLP ‘s Business & Technology practice focusing on technology transfer and licensing of intellectual property with a specific emphasis on open source business models. Most recently, Copenhaver was executive vice president and general counsel at Black Duck Software, Inc.