Emerging countries keep catching up
 
Emerging countries are being targeted for many reasons, primarily because of the enormous size of their markets. Consumers that is. They are seen by multinational companies as potential buyers of their products, as they are suffering from depressed and saturated western markets.
 
But Third World countries are learning fast. And their governments are shifting to the knowledge economy as many western countries have been doing in the past ten years.
 
While we might have believed that western standards would be swiftly adopted by all the countries in the developing world, Asia is now taking the lead and promoting new standards of its own. For example, China has developed a new compression algorithm called AVS that will replace MPEG 4 by next year. The reason: the costs of licensing fees that the numerous Chinese manufacturers have to pay (to Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems for example) to use the standard in their devices. Japan is threatening to do the same with its own. Are we entering another PAL/SECAM/NTSC war within the multimedia sector?
 
Furthermore, the Chinese State Council has ruled that ministries will now have to buy Chinese software, for example the China-made office productivity suite WPS Office 2003, when they renew their computers. China is also officially supporting the Red Flag Linux operating system, which will furnish the new computers bought by government.
 
There is something very interesting going on, and we should be concerned by the perception of business relations with emerging countries. Using developing countries’ cheap labour to create and manufacture products too expensive for them to buy in return is a rather awkward business model, and a good way to maintain the digital divide. But there are no simple answers to those questions, that WTO experts will have to deal with.
 
For the time being, FIAM is putting up a Technical action group - TAG (see below) to tackle issues related to intellectual property and copyrights in the Multimedia and Interactive Digital Content (MIDC) production. Feel free to direct your comments to this working group whose objective is to formulate FIAM’s position on those questions.

André G. Côté, Director-general

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FIAM to set up an international Technical Action Group (TaG): the Federation is organizing this working committee for the purpose of developing and presenting a common industry position on particular issues related to intellectual property (IP) and copyrights. The TaG IP is presided by Matthew Hall of the Australian Interactive multimedia industry association and is composed of association members and industry experts worldwide (see list of participants).
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Do international industry classification systems in existence today paint an accurate picture of how the MIDC industry is being accounted for? This important industry issue is the focus of FIAM for the forthcoming year, in collaboration with member associations, industry experts and relevant classification organizations.
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FIAM is readying itself for PrepCom3
(September 15-26), the last of three preparatory meetings leading to the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in Geneva, Dec 10-12, 2003. This summer, the WSIS secretariat scheduled a meeting called Inter-session period event in Paris, July 15-18, 2003, at the offices of UNESCO.
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The Federation is also happy to announce that it is joining the World Summit Awards (WSA), a three-year project held in the spirit and framework of and in cooperation with the World Summit on the Information Society 2003-2005. WSA concerns itself with the issues of creativity and quality digital content production and promotion, issues that are taking increasing importance in the WSIS discussions and debates, not to mention in the Declaration of principle and Action plan. (Read more)

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Tunisia
Our Tunisian member association @TIM is s holding, August 14-17, in the El Kantaoui Port, the fourth edition of its Internet festival focused this year on the employment opportunities provided by the new Internet medium. This event celebrates the dynamism of the Tunisian Web community as well as showcasing and promoting Tunisian digital content to the public at large.
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Canada
Electronic Arts (EA), world’s leading publisher of interactive entertainment, has selected Montréal as the site for a new creative studio. This will be the third investment in Canada, the Vancouver based studios having created the popular games FIFA Soccer, NBA Live, SSX, Need for Speed, NBA Street et Def Jam Vendetta.
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Australia
Australian interactive multimedia industry Association (AIMIA) member Philips Fox was chosen to lead the country’s Digital Agenda copyright reforms review. The law firm has released four issues papers as part of the government’s review process.
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Worldwide
The World Bank InfoDev program announced July 24, 2003, the launch of four studies examining current topics in ICT for development. These studies are to be completed and available on the infoDev website by the end of November, 2003.
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What goes around comes around: Considering the everlasting popularity of e-mails among individuals worldwide, one will not be surprised to learn that e-mails have only to be forwarded between five and seven times to reach almost any other e-mail user, confirming the adage that this is a small world indeed. This experiment follows on another test carried out in the late 60’s, by social psychologist Stanley Milgram who asked ‘randomly selected people in the US Mid-West to help get letters to a stockbroker friend in Boston on the East Coast’.
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Opening the doors to free software: By mid-August, prisons in New Zealand are going open-source following a decision by the Department of Corrections to provide an intranet for its 4500 staff. According to Corrections IT manager Derek Lyons, the new system (OpenCMS software) would be a step up form the current mix of static web pages and ordinary database systems, will improve acccess to internal information and allow for forums.
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Parting away, wirelessly…: that Malaysia is be the focus of a ‘peculiar’ use of wireless text messaging tells a lot about the ever popular use of cell phones and other wireless gizmos in that part of the world and in that Muslim country in particular. Peculiar, it is, as the country’s Islamic court will be obliged to issue fines of 265 dollars US and more or six months emprisonment to husbands who divorce their wives outside of the Islamic court system and who do it through short messaging services (SMS).
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