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 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.

Ray Gifford is president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation and a member of its board. Before joining the Foundation in 2003, Gifford served as chairman of the Colorado Public Utilities Commission for four years, following his appointment by US Governor Bill Owens. Gifford is a man of contradictions: his views tend to be unregulatory and pro-market, but at the same time he confesses being PUC Chairman was "a great, fulfilling, fascinating job."

Before joining the Commission, Gifford served under then-Colorado Attorney General (now Bush cabinet member) Gale Norton as First Assistant Attorney General for Regulatory Law. From 1993-1996, he worked for two national law firms-Kirkland & Ellis and Baker & Hostetler. The meager satisfactions of private practice lead him scrambling into the Attorney General's office. Gifford earned his law degree from the University of Chicago, where he absorbed the "law and economics" jurisprudence for which the school is (in)famous. He thus burdens his colleagues with his views on: the Coase theorem, public choice theory and the Chicago School antitrust revolution. In law school, he served as president of the Federalist Society and chairman of the Edmund Burke Society. He began his legal career as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard P. Matsch of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

Gifford studied philosophy, earning a Bachelor's degree from St. John's College in Annapolis , Maryland , home to the "Great Books" curriculum. Gifford teaches a seminar on the Law and Economics of the Information Age at the University of Colorado School of Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute.