In Australia and New Zealand government archival authorities have responsibility for preserving access to records of Australian Governments over the very long term, irrespective of the format of those records. Such archives are preserved for a wide range of government, social, legal and cultural purposes. Particular concerns arise with the preservation of digital formats. These include issues about the intellectual property constraints on and the technical sustainability of digital data formats. Failure to adopt effective measures for the preservation of digital materials poses significant risks to the national cultural, social and government administration values of Australian society. In Australia and New Zealand the archival approach to digital preservation that is followed by the National and State government archival authorities is founded on a strategy of migrating records from their original formats to formats based on open standards that have better prospects for enabling the records to remain useable over very long periods. Effective implementation of this digital preservation strategy requires the adoption of standards that foster the ready and practical development of rendering tools to ensure that digital records can be made accessible and useable. The OOXML specification as currently drafted remains dependent on proprietary implementations to a significant degree, has IP licensing arrangements that are not standard and that apparently impose significant constraints on use, and poses a considerable degree of implementation complexity. Formats based on such a standard are not likely to be viable for the purposes of preserving access to and use of digital records over the very long term.

The archives and records community is aware that there has been considerable international interest in the development of the draft OOXML standard. However it is not evident that the interests of the archives and records community has been adequately taken into account in the resulting draft. We support the standardization effort in this area and acknowledges the significant contribution of Microsoft in making its specification available to the process. We believe that further progress in enabling digital preservation can be achieved through expanding such industry collaboration.

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Proposed Disposition of DIS 29500 Comment AU-0003 (Modified: 2008-01-09) Open XML is the product of substantial effort by representatives from many industry and public institutions with diverse backgrounds and organizational interests. In particular, The British Library and the United States Library of Congress, both of whom have direct interest in preservation, participated in the work of TC45, the Ecma Technical Committee that created DIS 29500. As indicated in the Ecma OFFICE OPEN XML OVERVIEW ( http://www.ecma- international.org/news/TC45_current_work/OpenXML%20White%20Paper.pdf ), long term preservation of documents has been at the forefront of the goals of DIS 29500. “Perhaps the most profound issue is one of long-term preservation. We have learned to create exponentially increasing amounts of information. Yet we have been encoding that information using digital representations that are so deeply coupled with the programs that created them that after a decade or two, they routinely become extremely difficult to read without significant loss. Preserving the financial and intellectual investment in those documents (both existing and new) has become a pressing priority” Regarding IPR issues, DIS29500 fully complies with the Ecma and ISO/IEC/ITU IPR policies. ISO and IEC have received the appropriate IP declarations related to DIS29500 — these are on file in their database and ISO/IEC may be queried about them. All IPR matters should be referred to ITTF, as prescribed in the JTC 1 Directives for the Fast-Track process. National Bodies are respectfully encouraged to review the existing ISO/IEC/ITU Common Patent Policy, as requests to implement changes or extensions to this IPR Policy should happen through normal ISO/IEC processes and not through the DIS29500 BRM or vote. As to copyrights, please see JTC 1 Directives Section 10.2, which assigns DIS copyright to ISO and IEC. ISO and IEC representatives have repeatedly stated that they believe there are no IPR issues that would cause concern with the ISO/IEC/ITU Common Patent Policy or the adoption of DIS 29500, as explained in item 4.1 of the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 FAQ on DIS 29500 (which is publicly available at http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0932.htm ): 4.1 Will IPR issues be discussed at the BRM? No. IPR issues in this process are the exclusive preserve of the ITTF. IPR decisions have previously been delegated by all the ISO and IEC members (NBs) to the CEOs of IEC and ISO, and they in turn have examined them and found no outstanding problems. NBs seeking reassurance in such matters must pursue them through other avenues than the BRM. Ecma has the following comments: Contributions to Ecma were made under the Ecma Code of Conduct in Patent Matters, which we believe to be in line with ISO/IEC/ITU Common Patent Policy. As a member of Ecma, Microsoft has made information available to Ecma regarding any essential patent claims Microsoft may have in connection with ECMA-376, and this declaration was provided to JTC 1 together with the Fast-Track document. Ecma has been informed by ISO that Microsoft has also submitted to the ISO Central Secretariat a Patent Declaration Form related to licensing of any of its essential patent claims that are necessary to implement DIS 29500. Pursuant to such Patent Declaration Form, Microsoft has provided assurances to ITTF that any such essential claims vis-à-vis DIS 29500 will be available for full or partial implementations under three different approaches (from which an implementer can select). These options include Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise (see http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx ), Microsoft’s Covenant http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA102134631033.aspx ) and a royalty-free Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND-Z) license. The OSP enables both open source and commercial software to implement DIS 29500. See http://www.microsoft.com/interop/osp/default.mspx#EZCAC for statements from the open source community. We note that a growing number of implementations of ECMA-376 are becoming available, including those released by Apple (Mac OS X Leopard, iWork 08, iPhone), Adobe (InDesign), Microsoft (Office 2007, Office 2003, Office XP, Office 2000, Office 2008 Mac OS X), Novell (Suse Open Office) , Google (Search / Preview), Mindjet (MindManager), Intergen, OpenXML/ODF Translator (Open Source project on Sourceforge), Dataviz (DocumentsToGo on Palm OS, MacLinkPlus on Mac OS X Leopard), NeoOffice, Altova (XMLSpy), MarkLogic (XML Content Server), Datawatch (Monarch Pro), QuickOffice (QuickOffice Premier 5.0 on Symbian), Altsoft (XML2PDF Server 2007) and those under development by Corel (WordPerfect), AbiWord, Gnome (GNumeric), Xandros, Linspire, Turbolinux and others. These implementations are now available on many platforms, including Linux, the Macintosh, Windows, and handheld devices (PalmOS, Symbian, Windows Mobile). Due to ISO/IEC’s position on IPR issues as they have explained above, no changes to DIS 29500 are proposed.