The Prior Art

TPA Housekeeping: New Address, Phone, E-Mail

The Prior Art has returned to San Francisco, where I share an office with sister publication The Recorder.

Please note that office has moved to a new address:

1035 Market Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, California, 94103. 

The office move means I also have a new phone number at which I can be contacted: (415) 490-9944.

Finally, IP Law & Business' parent company has gone back to being ALM, which means I have a new email address that many sources and readers will find familiar: jmullin (at) alm.com.

IP Law & Business (IPLB) is part of the national magazine group of ALM, which includes titles like The American Lawyer and Corporate Counsel. The Prior Art is IPLB's in-house blog, authored by me, IPLB staff reporter Joe Mullin, and edited by IPLB editor Ed Shanahan. 

Photo: "Truth" mural, Market Street, San Francisco, California. Flickr / vision63

 

Patently Competitive

Gene Quinn, a lawyer who writes the IP Watchdog blog, is running a contest to rank the most popular patent blogs. Patently-O is killing everyone else, no surprise. 

While I'm happy to be included, I do consider The Prior Art Blog pretty different from the other competitors. Just eyeballing the list, they're nearly all written by patent lawyers and are generally on the legal analysis side of things, rather than the journalism side.

Having said that, I will now suggest, high-school-election style, that readers who enjoy this blog "Vote for Me!" There are two questions: 1) what's your favorite patent blog? and 2) which do you regularly read? The second question allows for multiple votes. You can also check the results so far.

This also reminds me that I have some TPA blog readers that don't necessarily check the IPLB website, and vice versa. Read whatever you enjoy, but for clarity's sake I will note that while my Patent Litigation Weekly column is always cross-posted on both the TPA blog and IPLB.com, other material, some material is only on one or the other.

Because of that, I'm going to be more conscientious about making at least a brief mention here when my work appears on IPLB.com. For example, IPLB.com recently covered closing arguments in the San Francisco RealDVD trial, as well as the cover story from our last print issue, about a Stanford HIV researcher in an unusual patent dispute.

Readers who want to keep up on everything at IPLB.com—which includes lots of IP content from our sibling publications—should check that site regularly or subscribe to its RSS feed.

Photo: J. Caldwell / Wikimedia

Announcing a new IPLB website

I'm happy to announce that IP Law & Business has a brand-spanking-new website up at IPLB.com. We'll have more content, updated more often, including:

• All of the content in the IPLB print edition will now be available online: free and freely linkable.
• Much more content will be available through the site than before. IPLB.com will include the most interesting IP-related coverage from our sibling publications, like The Recorder, The American Lawyer, and Law.com; as well as links to the most interesting copyright, patent, and trademark legal news from around the web. 
• IPLB.com now includes two years of the magazine's archives, organized by issue. Access to the archives is free with registration.
• Current and archived IPLB material is searchable with the Quest search tool, which can also be used to search throughout the Law.com network or the legal web.
• An IPLB RSS feed is available as well (see upper right corner of new site).

More features, including a weekly e-mail newsletter, are on the way.

The Prior Art has a nice new home on IPLB.com, in the grey box on the left hand column. If you're mainly a TPA blog reader, you don't have to change anything; this blog will continue to publish at its current URL, and whether you read by e-mail, RSS, or browser, things should look and act the same. But if you like the blog, I think you'll like the new site; so check it out!

The Prior Art, email-style.

Last night, I mustered up all of my limited HTML skills to add an email subscription option to the blog and make it look pretty... sort of. I really enjoy blogging. But come to think of it, making things look "sort of pretty" is actually a good description of how I spend a fair amount of my blogging time, unfortunately.

In any case, I may need to write in a time-consuming manner, but there's no need for anyone to read in such a way. I enjoy keeping up on several favorite blogs via email updates, so I'm glad to have the option available here. Button is on your left. The daily email gets sent out between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.

Other housekeeping issues: I messed around with the categories, creating a very primitive hierarchy that separates companies, law firms, cases (specific litigation I'm following), and categories that are subject matter-related. I'm erring on the side of more categories rather than less for now, even though lots of categories just have a post or two in them. We'll see how that works out; hopefully it will be useful.

Finally, I'm not going to keep putting the TrackBacks option on future posts; it's just not that popular and seeing a little TrackBack (0) on every post makes me sad. So that's that! Onward and upward. 

Change in comment policy

This blog turned six months old on Tuesday. Happy half-birthday!

That makes it a good time to make a change in policy. This blog has been open to comments since the start, but they've been moderated, a decision I made early on I was very new to this. (I've published every comment submitted to me, verbatim.)

Well, I just managed to annoy myself with my own policy after having to approve my own comment. The policy is unnecessary. So, I'm going to allow unmoderated comments, in the interest of generating a more vigorous public conversation and... not annoying myself.

I won't ever alter a comment in any way. I won't delete anything unless it's incredibly uncivil or somehow illegal. If I do delete part or all of a comment for one of those extraordinary reasons, I will note that I have done so. Anonymous comments are fine. Have fun!

UPDATE: I wrote this post and then didn't immediately change the setting, so several comments on last few posts went unpublished until now. They've all been published and now, Monday May 12th, the new comment policy is truly in effect. Really!

 

Change in the New Year

I recently accepted a position at IP Law & Business magazine. Started just a few days ago.

I'll continue to cover IP issues, and am still based in San Francisco.

While I'll continue to maintain this blog, the focus will change going forward. I'll continue to reflect on IP issues, but the blog will likely broaden and I'll write about some non-IP issues, including my thoughts on the 2008 election coverage, journalism generally, and a certain television show that will be an important part of my life for the next 10 weeks.

My new professional email is jmullin@alm.com; for personal matters please use joemullin@gmail.com.

Hope everyone's doing well in the new year!

A new project

This blog will feature notes and extras from my coverage of intellectual property and related topics at the San Francisco and Los Angeles Daily Journals.

The Daily Journal is California's leading legal affairs newspaper. It's published Monday through Friday and can be read online (by subscription) here.

On days when I have a story in the paper, I'll post about it on the blog (posts connected to print stories are categorized under "DJ Articles"), and will try to add something extra here. I'll also blog about various IP news and issues that catch my attention but don't make it into my stories.

Over time, I'll add notes on my some of my already published articles as well.

I'm new to blogging, and still fairly new to the IP beat, so comments, criticism, suggestions, and story tips are welcome. I look forward to joining the lively online conversation about IP legal issues.

Cheers
Joe Mullin