A number of folks have contacted me asking for up-to-the-minute updates on the trial. To begin with, I am tagging all relevant articles so that they appear in the EduPatents feed. I probably won’t blog about most of these directly unless I feel I have something substantially new to say about them, so my advice to those itching for news is to watch the feed. I will blog any new (non-confidential) information that I hear directly from people at the trial, and there is at least a small chance that I’ll have a guest blogger who is present in East Texas write a post or two on what he is seeing.
Has your new employer had anything to say about your blogging or making public comments about the trial?
Not really. They’ve asked me not to comment directly to major media on the topic (which I don’t feel the need to do anymore anyway) but I’ve been free to continue blogging about edupatents and even occasionally speaking about them at conferences. I’ve been a slightly more judicious in the language of my posts since becoming an employee, but this is very much my own personal choice, and I haven’t hesitated to speak out very directly when I think a new issue has popped up. On the whole, my bosses at Oracle have bent over backwards to give a great deal of independence. I don’t feel significantly constrained.
To answer your question more specifically, my employment at Oracle has nothing to do with the way I’m covering the trial at the moment. The main reason for using the EduPatents feed is exactly what I said in the body of the post. In general, I don’t tend to do a lot of link posts. I prefer to do longer analysis pieces most of the time. This is particularly true for the patent case during trial, when there may be a lot of information to pass along. If I have something new and substantial to say about any of the trial developments, I’ll post about it. But if I’m just passing along information from another source, it’s much more efficient for me to use the EduPatents feed.