First, if you haven't read the previous post ("BREAKING: European Commission preparing potential new regulation and/or directive on standard-essential patents"), I recommend it because it's a news item that is greatly more relevant than what I'm going to say here. But from time to time, there's a need for housekeeping posts.
Free subscriptions via follow.it
At this stage, it appears that those free subscriptions to daily notifications are working and the migration of the database from FeedBurner to follow.it has been successful.
Follow.it offers additional notification types. For example, you can also be notified of each post (as opposed to a daily digest). Some of you may wish to make use of that feature. I'm personally looking forward to the smartphone notifications the follow.it team has already announced, but not yet implemented.
A couple of readers who didn't get their email simply weren't in the database. I asked them to resubscribe, subsequently to which they also got their emails as intended.
Someone thought on a particular day that no notifications arrived, but that user had subscribed to more than one news source via follow.it and then some other website's post(s) came above mine, giving the false impression at first sight that my posts had not been included.
Not only did FeedBurner generate one email per news source but it also generated headlines at the top of emails containing three or more posts, as shown in this screenshot (click on the image to enlarge):
I've suggested to the follow.it team to implement something similar. They have a headlines-only option, but not one where you get both the headlines at the top and the body of each article in the same email. If we're all lucky, they'll add that feature in the not too distant future.
Generally, I recommend that in addition to email subscriptions you also follow me on Twitter and on LinkedIn as explained in this recent post. That further reduces the likelihood of you missing interesting information, and on social media you'll often see my posts before you receive an email notification from follow.it. RSS feeds are another means of being notified of new posts.
Premium subscription service
Early last month I announced a FOSS Patents premium subscription service. Just as I expected, the German legislature adopted a patent "reform" bill the following week. But two other things have since happened, too:
The Munich I Regional Court decided to create a third patent litigation division, which will be put in place in mid-August. Depending on when it holds its session, that may conflict with some Mannheim trials. But Mannheim is also a really important venue.
The presumably final hurdle for the UPC vanished into the air (apart from a mere formality remaining) with the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany denying preliminary injunction motions and declaring itself unconvinced of the underlying merits.
Normally I'd have intended to provide a subscription form at this stage. I still plan to track how German patent injunction case law evolves, but there are some important decisions to be made. Stay tuned for further news in the coming weeks.
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