The Unified Patent Court (UPC) had an internal event earlier in the week, which is why there were by far not enough decisions for a meaningful roundup. Presumably there will be a lot of orders in the days ahead. Our next UPC Roundup will cover a fortnight.
If you look at the menu at the top of our home page, you can see that we have restructured it a bit to make room for firm profiles. We’ll talk about that further below.
Premium content
Our enormous growth in all areas (which also includes that our ai fray website now has more than 28,000 LinkedIn followers) is the only reason for which the transition from free to freemium (free + premium content) has been delayed. But technically it’s in place. We have tested it, but we know that once a system is used by more people, there may be a need to make further changes.
Here’s what the paywall looks like. The next paragraph, which just tells you (if you can see it) that you have a premium membership, is hidden behind the paywall, and then the article continues (you can click here to skip the paywalled part):
To Read The Full Story
Continue reading your article with a Membership
For the avoidance of doubt, follow.it, which we use for email distribution, has nothing to do with these premium subscriptions. Everyone who received this article via follow.it received it in exactly the same version that a user without a premium account would see. Also, the follow.it login will not work here. The login button for ip fray is the little blue icon at the right end of the menu.
Take it easy
Don’t worry about losing access. Not only is there going to be a whole lot of free content (certain topics won’t be paywalled, and of all other content, approximately 20%-30% will remain free as well; plus, we will continue to be very active on LinkedIn) but we also won’t shut out anyone who is seriously interested in our content:
- Of the first few paywalled articles, only limited sections will be paywalled at all.
- Should any technical issues arise (despite the help we received from Memberpress and our own testing), we will react quickly and ensure that the affected content is placed outside the paywall.
- If you’ve previously inquired, you will get a quote one of these days, along with a terms of service PDF.
- You are genuinely interested but need a reasonable amount of time to secure internal approval? No problem. We’ll give you a corporate account for the start. It will enable you to add and remove readers from your legal entity and its affiliates (but strictly no third parties). We reserve the right to revoke it if things take too long to look promising, but the whole purpose of this is that you and your colleagues retain full access without interruption.
- Long-term complimentary subscriptions will be a rare exception. We offer such accounts only to courts (also including EPO TBA/EBA members and PTAB APJs) and to a very few governmental agencies (mostly to competition regulators, but generally not to patent offices apart from policy departments of patent offices that are directly and formally involved in national patent policy-making).
- To companies and law firms actively working with us on IP transactions (litigation finance, licensing campaigns or patent transfers) or having helped us acquire sponsorships, we will either grant discounts or, if large transactions have already happened, make free accounts available until the end of 2026 (for now).
If you are interested in premium membership and haven’t reached out about it yet, please email us at sales at the domain of this website.
The categories that are going to be placed outside the paywall are:
- patent pools
- multimedia patents (video streaming etc.)
- AI-related patent matters
- games-related patent matters
- litigation finance
We reserve the right to change the above list, but that is the plan for at least 2025.
Firm profiles
In our new menu you can find links to our law firm directories that have only placeholder content for now: UPC Representatives and SEP Litigators. You can also find a partly AI-generated dummy firm profile.
Our approach to firm profiles is that we want to provide a value-add. We think your firm’s website is where potential clients will always find the most and the best information about you. But we feel we can still make a useful contribution by providing in-house counsel in search of SEP- and/or UPC-related advice and representation with additional lists. In particular, we will point to various SEP- and UPC-related achievements. You are always in control: only you determine which success stories will be listed.
We will not group by country because these are international topics. Should the list of firms become unwieldy, then we’ll group by continent.
Thank you for your support!
In only 18 months since its launch, ip fray has become very popular and we really appreciate it. We value our sponsors enormously, and those partnerships do not affect our editorial independence. What the premium membership approach enables us to do, however, is to cover topics that you (the readers) are interested in and that we would like to cover, but which are outside the scope of the sponsorships we have and any further sponsorships we can realistically get. We will grow our team and further improve our processes so we can better serve you.