By Florian Mueller (founder of Fray Media LLC, publisher of ip fray)
Half a year ago (to the day), this website was launched. On the occasion of this half-birthday, I would like to thank all of you — ip fray‘s esteemed readers — for your interest and your support.
ip fray‘s follower base on LinkedIn is growing organically at a very good rate. It will hit 5K in a few months. The plan for 2025 is to surpass, or at least get much closer to, 10K. Google traffic is growing at a similar rate. Email subscriptions are growing faster, at a lower absolute level.
Fray Media’s business is also on track. ip fray‘s sibling site ai fray has a sponsorship model, with one of the world’s largest corporations already having been disclosed as an official backer (About ai fray page). ip fray will soon announce a podcast series sponsored by a well-known wireless innovator. And while litigation finance is a publicity-shy field, Fray Media was able to announce a first major project of that kind (April 3, 2024 ip fray article), with a deal to be closed rather soon.
In order for Fray Media to grow further in 2025, and to be able to consistently cover case law development in the United States and Europe, ip fray will become a subscription service on or before January 1, 2025. But there will still be a fair amount of free-of-charge content, on LinkedIn as well as here.
Here’s a Q&A, but if you have other questions or just wish to share comments, please feel free to reach out either by messaging ip fray on LinkedIn or by emailing me (just my initials, and the domain of this website).
Is this a definitive decision?
100% yes. I can guarantee that this is not just tentative or a means of testing reactions to an idea.
The exact scope of the free content will depend, inter alia, on sponsorships. But there is a key content category — rapid and consistent case law coverage (particularly, but not exclusively, U.S. and European case law) — that provides far greater value to licensing and litigation professionals than to potential sponsors. It is therefore only theoretically, but definitely not practically, conceivable that this plan would change because of someone making an offer.
Three years ago, I tentatively thought about launching a new subscription service covering German case law. The situation was very different, and when the creation of the UPC suddenly accelerated as the constitutional challenge in Germany went nowhere, it was the primary reason I shelved the plan.
What will it cost?
The exact subscription fees will be announced on or before September 1, 2024. What I can say already is that a single subscription will cost slightly less than $100/month or $1,000/year.
There will be corporate packages for firm-wide subscriptions at substantially discounted rates. Single subscriptions from organizations where it is obvious that internal sharing would likely occur will not be accepted.
Courts of law that hear patent infringement cases (such as Article III courts in the U.S. or the UPC, but also the USITC with its quasi-judicial authority under Sec. 337) as well as competition enforcement authorities (e.g., FTC, DOJ, DG COMP, CMA) will receive complimentary subscriptions. ip fray has loyal readers in those circles, and I consider it only fair that they can read what is written about their proceedings and decisions.
Why is this change announced six months in advance?
The facts are already clear by now, especially after an evaluation of LinkedIn dynamics over the past couple of months.
If you need to make room in your budget for this subscription, you now have plenty of time to revisit the usefulness of some other subscriptions you may have.
Fray Media will begin negotiations with potential sponsors for 2025 immediately, though those talks may pick up speed only after the summer vacation season.
The turn of the year is the best season for a technical change, given that there could be glitches that are easier to cure when there are fewer news cycles per week. ip fray will do some non-urgent stories (2024 in review, 2025 outlook) around that time: perfect for testing.
How much content can paying subscribers expect?
Without entering into a binding obligation right here and now, the objective is certainly to provide rapid and consistent coverage of case law developments, particularly but not only in the United States and Europe, in the field of patent infringement litigation. Put differently, readers will be up to date on a lot of key developments and should be able to save time on their own research, though it is obvious that no one should rely exclusively on one service: litigators will still have to read many important decisions themselves, but hopefully the analysis they find here will be of value. The objective is, of course, to make it a “must read” for patent licensing and litigation professionals.
Where can one still find free-of-charge ip fray content?
Obviously, ip fray‘s LinkedIn page is accessible free of charge. The same applies to its X (Twitter) account, though that platform is much less popular among patent professionals these days than LinkedIn.
For articles that appear on this website, the decision involves two steps:
- Is there a sponsorship agreement in place under which the article is made available for free? If yes, that answers the question.
- Otherwise it’s a case-by-case decision:
Is it in ip fray‘s strategic interest (growth) to put a given story outside the paywall? That is a balancing of the extent to which the story may attract new readers and the reasonable expectation of paying subscribers to get exclusive content. Fray Media’s other business interests, such as in the field of litigation finance, will also be a factor.
ip fray will have the flexibility to paywall only particular parts of articles (the technical implementation is discussed toward the end of this Q&A).
It is possible that some articles will be unpaywalled after a reasonably long period (such as 12 months), but no decision has been made in that regard yet.
What content categories may be sponsored?
Fray Media now has six months, with the goal to reach decisions in the early fall, to entertain potential sponsorships for 2025.
It is too early to tell what the outcome will be. There might be no sponsorship at all, in which case the second step laid out in the previous section is the decisive one (growth versus exclusivity).
The broadest conceivable range of a sponsored category would be standard-essential patents (SEPs). That would realistically require more than one sponsor. Narrower categories such as collective licensing programs, automotive, IoT (with or without automotive included) or video are easier to make work. Also, there could be jurisdictional sponsorships, such as for Brazil, China, India, Japan or the UK. And sponsorships of particular media productions, such as podcasts.
Furthermore, if law firms wish to provide discount coupons to their clients (or pool administrators to their licensors and/or licensees), Fray Media stands ready to offer attractive terms, but only if such agreements are struck well ahead of launch given that some potential subscribers might otherwise just wait until they get a coupon.
What about promotional opportunities such as firm profiles?
No definitive decision has been made, but ip fray may also offer firm and attorney profiles on its website. Those would not be paywalled. Firms taking a subscription for all of their legal professionals would get a free firm profile, and can optionally pay for additional attorney profiles.
Will Fray Media organize conferences?
This is always a possibility, but clearly not a priority as we speak.
Why 2025?
The possibility of a subscription model was already mentioned in a slide deck that Fray Media sent to a few potential partners in January. The internal plan was to turn ip fray into a subscription service by January 2026, but the dynamics are strong enough to make that change one year ahead of plan.
2025 will be an important year particularly for the Unified Patent Court (UPC) as the first appeals of final (post-main proceedings) judgments will reach its Court of Appeal (CoA) soon. The plan is for ip fray to follow developments closely and to attend various hearings in Luxembourg in person. Funding that effort through subscriptions is the best solution as the priorities are then set by readers, not sponsors, and safeguards editorial independence.
And, to be perfectly honest, the longer it takes for an online publication to “go subscription,” the harder it is for its readership to get used to it. That is also part of the reason to make the announcement sooner rather than later.
How will it work in technical terms?
ip fray runs on WordPress. The subscription offering will be enabled by the Memberpress plugin.
Memberpress provides enormous flexibility. It supports corporate (or “bulk”) accounts, which means that an organization can manage its own subscriptions. It can appoint an administrator who then has the ability to add or remove subscribers.
Subscribers will receive email notifications of new articles. Memberpress can be connected with different mail services, and Fray Media will choose one of them.
You can already now subscribe to ip fray‘s emails that contain new articles. It is still recommended to do so. Even those who don’t take a paying subscription will be able to be notified: they just can’t read paywalled articles (or paywalled passages of articles).
What does this have to do with the AI revolution?
For the avoidance of doubt, this decision relates to ip fray only and does not mean anything for Fray Media’s other properties such as ai fray.
The initial implementation with Memberpress is based on non-AI technologies. However, as technical progress is made, AI will make it ever easier to run an online publishing operation without needing much staff. More and more processes will be automated.
Fray Media will increasingly take technical measures to prevent its articles from being scraped by AI bots. The paywall should already have that effect with respect to that part of ip fray‘s content. Fray Media has not extended a license to any AI provider and at this stage does not contemplate doing so.