It will be recalled that in February and March of 2022, thanks to sponsorship of the Schwegman firm, many hundreds of people all around the world were able to attend my lectures about the Patent Cooperation Treaty. This was a remarkable series of fifteen lectures spread over about six weeks.
The lectures got recorded and the recordings got posted, along with the slides. This meant that anybody who had missed the live lectures could watch the lectures later, free of charge. This meant that this generous gift of the Schwegman firm to the world patent community was a gift that kept on giving. (One place where you can see the recordings and slides is here.) You might wonder how many have watched the recorded lectures. Here are some statistics on that.
By way of background, the determined viewer who wished to print out all of the 725 slides on one’s own printer could do so. Another option is to purchase a bound volume of the slides which is available on Amazon.com for $9.95. (I note that printing out the slides on one’s own printer would probably burn up more than $10 worth of toner and paper.)
The lecture recordings got posted on several platforms, one of which is my own firm’s video file server. I am only able to track the hits on my own firm’s server, so I do not know all of the hits that happened across all server platforms. But here are hit counts from my own firm’s video file server. What we see is that the people who chose to watch that videos on my firm’s server (as distinguished from those who viewed the videos on other servers) added up to 30 or 40 who somehow had the energy to plug through to the end of all 15 videos.
What I find a bit curious is that the hit count for downloading the slides actually added up to more hits than the hit count for viewing the recorded lectures.
Personal comment: I downloaded both the slides & the videos from all these lectures and to your questions, my answers are:
1. Cost of printing out slides – I run a paperless office and therefore it would never occur to me to print off the slides. It’s much easier to look at the slides on my computer at the same time as looking at other resources to compare.
2. Downloading slides vs the videos – It’s much quicker to scroll through the slides to find the information that I require than it is to watch whole videos and/or try to locate the bit that you want from the video. This is true not just for the lecture series you discuss, but also for the CPD equivalents from my professional institutions (CIPA & EPI), EPO, WIPO (ePCT & eHague) and other professional IP firms.
I bought the bound volume. While I generally prefer paperless, it looks so good next to my copy of Oppedahl on PCT Forms!