This here is about a couple of housekeeping matters. I wish to make it easy for you to follow my commentary, as I'm honored by serving such a sizable audience, including--but not limited to--thought leaders and decision makers in a variety of institutions and corporations.
Google is going to discontinue the FeedBurner email service, which has been delivering my blog posts to my email subscribers on a daily basis (except on days on which I don't publish anything, of course). FeedBurner will apparently continue to remain available, but those daily digests (which you can subscribe to on the right-hand side) will stop being delivered after this month of July.
I will soon move those thousands of email addresses to a new service, and you'll presumably receive emails asking you to confirm that you're still interested in receiving those updates on new FOSS Patents blog posts. Before that happens, I will do a dedicated blog post here that will tell you what kind of email to watch out for. Today I just wanted to give you a heads-up well in advance.
In order to keep FOSS Patents reasonably focused, I've recently started commenting on some topics only on LinkedIn but not on this blog. I encourage you to follow me on LinkedIn. Following sets up a unidirectional feed, which thousands of people already get. Please send me an "invite" to establish a full-blown LinkedIn connection only if we know each other, if we have at least two dozen mutual contacts there already, if you're a journalist interested in quotes, or if you have another very specific request (in which case I would encourage you to send me a LinkedIn InMail prior to an invite).
Limiting some of my commentary to LinkedIn is all about focus. "FOSS Patents" is admittedly just a legacy name that is far narrower than the range of topics this blog covers. Initially it was about patent disputes and patent policy issues related to free and open-source software (FOSS). It became mostly a smartphone patents blog, to some degree a blog about FRAND-pledged standard-essential patents (which raise questions under antitrust and contract law), but from the beginning I also discussed tech antitrust matters (back in 2010, even some issues related to IBM's mainframe computers) that went beyond the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Since last summer, App Store antitrust disputes like Epic Games v. Apple and Epic Games v. Google have also been a key topic, and I still haven't decided on how best to structure my commentary on those antitrust investigations and lawsuits.
In recent months, I have sometimes deliberately posted some commentary only to LinkedIn and not to this blog or to Twitter. Sometimes it was about patent-related developments that I considered interesting, but not worthy of a dedicated FOSS Patents post that many thousands of subscribers would find in their inbox. LinkedIn posts are a great format for microblogging.
In recent years, Microsoft has kept improving LinkedIn in many ways, and this year I discovered the option of making "Follow" the primary means of connecting with me on LinkedIn. That option was created for people who publish information that may be of interest to a readership that far extends beyond their direct contacts.
On Thursday, I created my first LinkedIn article: I translated the injunctive orders at the end of a Spanish court's decision in European Superleague Company & A22 v. FIFA & UEFA (which in turn got quoted by Off The Pitch, a leading soccer industry news service). That is an example of an EU antitrust law topic I find interesting, and may comment on again at some point, but which I wouldn't want to discuss on this present blog going forward.
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