Farewell

As announced some time ago, I will become a member of the Boards of appeal in 2014, which means that I cannot be a case law blogger any more.

I had the intention of continuing the blog for some more weeks, but as it turns out, I have run out of noteworthy decisions, which has never happened since 2009, when this blog took off. I take this as a sign that the time has come to terminate the proceedings.

I know some colleagues who have the intention of pursuing the work; I hope these projects will be reduced to practice and, if so, I shall be happy to provide links. 

This blog, however, will go silent. What has been published so far will remain online, as requested by some of you.

Let me just thank those of you whose comments have made this blog a more interesting place. Thanks to pat-agonia, Myshkin, MaxDrei, Roufousse T. Fairfly, Manolis, Raoul, George Brock-Nannestad, DrZ, ExaMinus, Rimbaud - to mention just a few dear contributors - as well as to those who preferred to stay anonymous. My thanks also go to Laurent Teyssèdre, the father of EPC case law blogging, whose blog was quite an inspiration to me.

All the best

oliver

Board deliberation (in a composition pursuant to A 21(4)(a) EPC)

Changes Ahead

As some of you already know, I have very recently been appointed technical member of a Board of appeal. This is both a great honour and an enormous pleasure to me. I wish to thank all of you who have sent their congratulations by e-mail or via the blog.

Obviously, this appointment means that I can no longer be an EPC case law blogger.

Does this mean that the blog will come to an end?

Not necessarily. Perhaps some reader(s) would like to continue the work. If so, please let me now by sending me an e-mail (oliver.randl[@]gmail.com).

I have three remarks in this respect:

First, I think it would be more reasonable to have a team of bloggers rather than a single person. A one-decision-per-day blog is a heavy workload. I am quite a bête de somme and I think that more reasonable people would want to carry a lighter burden.

Secondly, I have to warn you that this work is relatively unrewarding. You will have trouble (the blog even brought me before the disciplinary instances of the epi once) and not much gratification other than some new friends all over Europe (some of which will remain pseudonymous) and the certainty that wherever you go in patent circles some nice fellow will come and tell you that (s)he enjoys the blog. So if you want to do this work, it should be out of love for the case law and the desire to be of service.

Thirdly, I would recommend that rather than pursuing K’s Law you start your own blog. This would free you from all the constraints that come from an existing structure. For instance, you might want to abandon the graphical design and have a bright background rather than a black one; this would involve a tremendous amount of work on K’s Law if you intended to maintain the previous 1300+ posts, which would become more or less unreadable on a bright background. So I think it would be wiser to start a new blog and send me the URL, so that I can inform the K’s Law readers about the new offer.

If no one comes forward, then the blog will indeed become inactive in a few weeks.

All in all, it was quite a pleasure to serve you. I hope that the blog will have made some of you discover the joys of studying the case law. 

Keep readin’.

Cheers

oliver

Publish Or Perish (ctd.)

At the end of each quarter, I have a look at the number of decisions that have been published on the DG3 website. Of course, it is way too early to assert anything, but there might be a slight upward trend in the number of decisions:

Number of decisions published on the DG3 website 
during the first quarter, for the years 2008 to 2013

The rhythm of publication was more smooth in 2013:

Number of decisions published per day 
between January 1 and March 31, 2013

than it was in 2012:

Number of decisions published per day 
between January 1 and March 31, 2012

Apropos rhythm of publication, you might be aware that there was a poll on whether this blog should have weekend (i.e. Saturday evening) posts. The number of participants was small, which probably means that most of my readers do not really care. About two thirds of those who participated thought that five posts per week were more than enough, about one third liked the weekend posts.

As you might have realized, the weekend posts were somewhat different from the rest, because I never published ‘important’ decisions on weekends; I rather presented decisions dealing with interpretative issues (“Interpretative Spotlight”), reviews of old decisions (“Oldies But Goldies”) and decisions that I found to be unspectacular but still interesting.

I sort of liked these posts but I understand that some readers, especially those having an e-mail subscription, were annoyed by them. In view of the outcome of the poll, I will, as a rule, not publish weekend posts any more. A reduction of the overall number of posts also allows me to take account of the (admittedly subjective) finding that, for whatever reason, there appear to be less “interesting” decisions as the overall number of decisions increases. (As a physicist, I would believe this has something to do with the law of conservation of energy.)

Posts of more statistical character (such as the present one) will still be published on weekends.

A last point perhaps. This week was special because there was the famous April fool’s post on fee reductions for applications filed in Latin. Very unexpectedly (to me), this post was an enormous success and immediately became the second most popular post ever. The fact that two fellow bloggers referred to it on their blogs certainly contributed to this hype. I have to admit that I am somewhat embarrassed by the craze because what was intended to be a joke for case law freaks (if I may say so) has reached people well beyond that sphere, who may or may not be able to appreciate it, which leaves me with mixed feelings. I hope that nobody was offended and, to end on a Latin note, that I have not become a persona non grata in the Isar Building. In which case I might as well pursue my career ... in Latin America.

Valete! 

On Translations

I wanted to thank all of you who have participated in the recent poll on translations.

The outcome was quite unanimous. No one thought that “it would be better to have the posts in the language of the decision (English, French or German, as the case may be)” and a significant part of the voters (about 30%) stated that they did not need translations but thought that they should be maintained. The great majority (about 70%) would have regretted if K’s Law did not offer translations any more.

So let us not change anything for the time being.

Birthday Musings

As this blog celebrates its third birthday today, let me offer you a bonus in the form of a – not so serious – list of commented key figures.

250 000

Approximate number of page views so far. A fairly impressive but somehow profoundly uninteresting number. Admittedly, I just cited it to have one really big number in my list.

1470

Number of pageviews of the most popular post ever published on this blog – a summary of G 1/08 (“Leave Mendel Alone”). Funny that what I call a “catholic” post (i.e. one where you are told what the original text says, without actually reading it) should be the most popular on a blog of more “protestant” outlook (where you are invited to read the original texts).

1001

Number of posts published so far. Better known as the number of nights during which Sheherazade told her stories to King Shahryār. I guess she would not have survived had she chosen extracts from the case law of the Boards of appeal.

997

Number of comments left so far. The technically competent among the readers of this blog will confirm that this means that there was an average number of about 1 comment per post. In other words, my readers are not only competent but also taciturn – two qualities that often go together.

950

Estimated number of decisions reported so far. If you are a reader of this blog since its beginnings, you have read more BoA decisions than the average attorney reads in his whole career, I would think. But then, maybe the average attorney is right.

458

Number of pageviews of the most popular post of this third year, a post presenting statistical data on the 2012 BoA decisions. I intend to publish an update in early 2013. Unless the end of the world takes place on December 21, that is.

319

Number of active e-mail subscriptions. I never figured out why anybody (except perhaps Robinson Crusoe on his island) would want to have an e-mail notification from a blog that publishes daily, but the number of subscribers proves that there must be some good reason to do so.

200

Approximate number of on-line visitors per day. Leonidas had his 300, I have my 200. May my end be more peaceful than his.

6

Number of posts per week. As a rule, there is one post per day, six days a week, but never on Shabbat or Sunday. I let you figure out how that can be done.

4

Number of countries that provide more than 10% of the on-line readers of this blog: the Netherlands (all people connecting from the Office appear as Dutch), Germany, France and the UK. The presence of Brits was on the rise recently – which, in European undertakings, is a sign that the end is near.

3

Number of years of existence of this blog. Less than the age of reason, but perhaps more than what would have been reasonable.

2

Number of official languages of the EPO from which I translate into English. I sometimes have the feeling that most of my readers do not need translations, aber vielleicht sind ja doch nicht alle des Deutschen fähig, sans parler de la langue de Molière – allez savoir.

1

Number of contributors to this blog. Not ideal, because there is nobody else to blame.

0

Number of quid I earned with this blog. Great-uncle Shmuel always told me I was not good with the money. How true.

Weaning

“I just joined a support group for Internet addicts.
We discuss every night from 7 pm until midnight on Facebook.”

I now begin a fortnight of Internet abstinence. Unless there is a technical problem, you will nevertheless find new posts on the blog, at the usual rhythm. However, I will not be able to react to your comments.

If you are in need of very fresh decisions, you might want to check out the latest posts on Le blog du droit européen des brevets, or go ad fontes on the DG3 webpage.

See ya

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!