This website is intended to be the leading online resource on Unified Patent Court (UPC) as well as standard-essential patent (SEP) matters, without narrowing the focus exclusively to only those two major areas of interest. This is a follow-up to the June 23, 2024 announcement.
The transition will take place in two steps:
- Starting sometime in December 2024, most new content will be available only to those who register an account. Initially, registration will be free.
- By the end of January 2025, or in February 2025 at the latest, premium content will require a subscription. Courts, competition enforcers and policy makers will get complimentary subscriptions. ip fray is proud of having many high-power readers, email subscribers and LinkedIn followers from all over the world.
There are practical reasons for the two-step transition. Subscriptions will be provided only to organizations (companies, law firms, institutions) and individually arranged. That can take time to organize, even more so during the winter vacation season. It is recommended that you ask those departments to get in touch early by sending an email to sales@(the domain of this website). In the case of law firms, it would be best for marketing directors to reach out, as firm-wide subscriptions will come with firm profiles and optional attorney profiles (the profiles will not be paywalled).
There will be a mix of premium (subscription) and free content. The majority of ip fray‘s new content will require a subscription. Apart from a limited amount of sponsored content that will be designated as such (properly disclosing each article’s sponsor, such as in the case of last week’s podcast) and articles that ip fray‘s non-paywalled sibling sites may link to, approximately 20% of ip fray‘s new content will still be made available outside the paywall. There will be no particular pattern. Decisions will be made on an article-by-article basis. There may be significant weekly or monthly fluctuations, but over the course of a year, the 80-20 target will be reached.
Without a registered account and, later, a subscription, you will still be able to read headlines (plus maybe one paragraph per article) as well as LinkedIn and X posts.
The subscription model will enable ip fray to cover developments that are of interest to the readership (such as UPC appeals with the potential to clarify fundamental questions of patent law) regardless of whether any particular organization would consider sponsoring those efforts.
As for UPC coverage, ip fray has a plan for how to accomodate the preferences of those who prefer “as it happens” coverage as well as those who like to take a look only once a day or once a week. That concept will be implemented when registrations are required for access to most new content.
ip fray is aware of a business-to-business newsletter publisher having recently hired reporters in different places to cover IP lawsuits on a subscription basis, though certain recruits in D.C., Brussels and London do not appear to bring prior experience in patent litigation (one of the most specialized fields imaginable) to the table if their LinkedIn profiles are any indication. ip fray looks forward to leveraging its patent litigation, transactions and policy expertise in competing with anyone, including the newbies.
ip fray will also staff up in order to have more diverse content.
Again, please have your purchasing departments or, in the case of law firms, marketing departments reach out early to sales@(the domain of this website).