New passports have arrived, tickets bought, and in a couple of weeks much of PFF's staff will be off to Milan and Brussels to talk about open standards, product and service interoperability, and open source software.

We will be reporting regularly, so keep track of the Digital Europe home page.

The topic may sound dry, though we have been working hard to punch up the descriptions with gratuitous sex and violence, but the issues are crucial to the development of the digital world. Further, the debate over standards -- whether they can and should sometimes be proprietary -- is a very important part of the debate over intellectual property specifically, property rights in general, and market society.

Specific events:

On Friday, February 11, PFF and the Istituto Bruno Leoni will hold a day-long seminar in Milan for 25 or so mostly-European opinion leaders. (Here are the Agenda and the Theme Statement.) Anyone who would like to attend, let us know and if IBL tells us there is room we will accommodate you. There is no charge, but if you come, you must commit to come for the entire day. No damn flitting in and out.

The day before (Feb. 10), some of us will spend a couple of hours in an informal session with IBL and some Italian graduate students to discuss Spontaneous Order in Cyberspace -- linking events in the standards world to the work of such thinkers as Terry Anderson and Hernando De Soto. If this Hayekian topic enthralls you, let us know.

On Tuesday, February 15, we will partner with the Centre for the New Europe to put on a luncheon for members of the EU Parliament and other luminaries, at which Ray Gifford will speak, and on the evening of Wednesday, February 16, Jim DeLong will lead the discussion at a CNE Parliamentary Assistants Forum.

Each of these events will be on the topic Does ‘Open Standards' Mean ‘Open Source'? The description in the invitation says:

In the free-wheeling digital age, companies are often in the position of competing fiercely while at the same time cooperating -- ensuring that their products and services can work together.

How this cooperation should be brought about is the subject of strongly conflicting views. Everyone agrees that it requires "open standards," interfaces available for use by all. But that is the limit of consensus. One school believes that standards can be called "open" only if they are "open source" -- available at no cost, owned by no one, and produced by a community process. The competing view point says that companies should be able to develop and own proprietary standards, with openness guaranteed by the rules of standard-setting groups, by contract, and by property rights.

At present, the "open source" camp probably has the upper hand in this debate.

In this session, Ray Gifford [James DeLong] will describe the conflict, and lay out the case for allowing proprietary standards as the best way to provide incentives for innovation and investment while still guaranteeing access.

(This is after I punched it up -- you should have seen the first draft.)

Again, anyone with an interest in these events should let us know and we will contact CNE to see if there is room.

For more thoughts on the issues, see Tom Lenard's blog entry.