Brexit leads the way in the IAM blog reads rankings for the first seven months of the year

The IAM blog is taking its annual August break in order to recharge its batteries after what has been a pretty relentless first seven months of the year. To keep you entertained while we are away, following is a list of the 20 most read stories on the blog in 2016 so far, in descending order of popularity. The reads reflect the fact that these days the IP market extends way beyond the US, with events in both Europe and China of huge interest to our readership.

Brexit, not surprisingly, has been by far the most referenced subject – especially as events in the US are driving a number of patent owners there to come to Europe to launch suits. That said, the US is still of a major player and stories from there continue to generate big read numbers. Note, too, the number of transaction-based stories in the top 20. Even though it may not always seem like it, there is still an active deals market out there and a fair few companies are doing well from it.

We are scheduled to be back in action on 29^th August, but should any big stories break in the meantime, rest assured that we will put down our buckets and spades to cover them.

1. Europe's potential to sit at the heart of the global patent market may have to be reconsidered

2. Start-ups that file for patents are 35 times more likely to be successful than those which don’t, new research reveals

3. Battistelli under pressure like never before as over half of EPO staff vote for strike action

4. First half US patent litigation down dramatically with new suits falling by almost 1,000

5. Two new deals show that BlackBerry's patent monetisation strategy is all systems go

6. The Beijing IP court gave foreign IP plaintiffs a perfect 65-0 win rate in 2015, reports one of its judges

7. Multi-million dollar Blackberry transaction set to put former Alcatel-Lucent IP leaders back in the game

8. The UK's Brexit vote will mean more complexity and higher costs for IP owners in Europe

9. IV spins-out invention fund, Yahoo! patent sale, Brexit bypass & much more from IPBC Global 2016 Day One

10. Chinese IoT upstart LeEco poaches Google patent counsel to roll out IP strategy

11. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM and 14 others team up with AST to launch new patent buying initiative

12. Qualcomm’s licensing model will be “destroyed” if it can’t win key China case, says its ex-Asian patent director

13. The IP Personalities of 2015, part one

14. Technicolor CIPO explains why the company left the HEVC Advance patent pool

15. The figures indicate that the PTAB really is the patent death squad for NPEs

16. We’re in patent licensing, not patent selling, mode, says BlackBerry CEO

17. Xiaomi’s fledgling IP portfolio gets biggest boost yet with acquisition of several hundred Intel patents

18. It would be politically wrong and morally indefensible to ignore the Brexit vote and plough on with the UPC

19. Qualcomm’s USPTO registration bonanza shows that companies still see big benefits in owning patents

20. Supreme Court Cuozzo ruling delivers hammer blow to patent owners and leaves the PTAB death squad intact