Birthday Musings

It is one year ago today that this blog came into existence.

It all started in a relatively spontaneous manner. Armand Grinstajn published some posts on decisions he had found interesting. He did not know whether this would become periodic, but he thought that daily publications were a good rhythm for a weblog. But would there be enough decisions worth reporting to keep this pace? It turned out that there would.

Being an experimentalist, Armand decided that he would not do any advertising for his blog. He only left his url when making comments on other IP blogs. How long would it take to have readers? But this experiment came to a sudden end when Laurent Teyssèdre, to whose popular blog Armand had made some minor contributions, discovered the existence of K’s Law and informed his readers.

Armand had made a mistake when giving pieces of information on himself. He had (rightfully) declared being a European patent attorney. As curious people looked up his name in the register and could not find it, trouble began. He was accused of being a deceiver, or alternatively of violating the rules of conduct by providing false information. His case was examined in higher spheres, but without much outcome. As the reason for having a pseudonym had disappeared in the meantime, it was decided that Armand should leave and Oliver take over.

Now, one year later, the blog has a bit more than 100 visitors per working day; there have been almost 25000 visits so far. Readers appear to include patent attorneys, patent attorney candidates, but also EPO examiners and even some members of the Boards themselves.

Where do my readers come from? Here is a graph provided by my web counter:

The great number of French readers has historical reasons ; their share is actually decreasing. The Netherlands were quite strong from the very beginning, but I have been told that EPO staff, even when located in Munich or Berlin, appear as Dutch when connecting from their workplace. I had relatively few UK readers until recently when Jeremy Phillips kindly mentioned the blog among other Wednesday Whimsies. Germany has not been very present until recently, either. I have no explanation to offer for the considerable number of American readers.

One of my major disappointments concerns the comments left by readers. I had imagined that K’s law could call into being a web community of people interested by case law. It just did not happen. Most comments are anonymous, and sometimes we have those weird discussions between anonymi. This might be due to the fact that the blog is of a semi-professional nature and that the IP community is relatively small. As a matter of fact, most IP blogs are contaminated with the anonymity virus. I can fully understand that people do not wish to reveal their real identity, but there are other ways to stay under cover. On most blogs outside the IP domain which I follow, there are indeed communities, where people use pseudonyms. This allows to “get to know” each other without actually knowing each other’s names. On K’s law, I am always pleased to see Rimbaud or pat-agonia. I have no clue who they are, nor do I need to know, but they are people with a name. Pseudonymity allows for some warmth, whereas anonymity is utterly cold. But there is not much that I can do about that.

Coming back to my own contributions, there have been 360 posts on about 340 different decisions. Looking back, I would say that the last year was not an outstanding vintage: as far as I can see, there have been no real landmark decisions. Still, I believe to have shown that there were lots of useful things to grasp.

Will there be a full second season for K’s Law ? Honestly, I can’t tell. As you can imagine, there is much work behind such a blog. Any major event, be it professional or private, could take me out. Also, I do not believe that it is man’s chief end to glorify case law, and to enjoy it for ever, if you know what I mean. But for the time being, EPC case law blogging is still fun and I intend to have K’s law go on for some more time. See ya then!