As summer fades away ...

If you've been away all summer, or at least the most recent bit of it, welcome back to harsh reality. With all these rumours of recession in the air, we know that the world's economy depends on IP to drive it forward -- so let's be positive and do our bit! More new products, more creativity, more licences (particularly for green and energy-saving technologies) and more litigation ...


In case you were away when it was announced, next week the Solo IP group is meeting on Wednesday 10 September, 5 to 6.30pm, when LexisNexis' Small and Mid Law Market Champion Stuart Greenhill is going to be speaking (and listening) on the subject of the gap between small IP practitioners' needs and large IP publishers' products, or something along those lines. Stuart is bringing a couple of minders with him and he may well need them, since something tells him that The Man from Westlaw might just be turning up. Refreshments provided. No charge. Hosted by Olswang. Email Jeremy here if you'd like to attend.


Tonight's the deadline for submitting limericks in the IPKat's latest competition, for which the winning prize is free admission to CLT's increasingly-popular Intellectual Property in the Fashion Industry conference on Tuesday 23 September (click here for details). This competition has produced a record entry and the results will be published later this week. A star attraction this year is the attendance of the IPKat's friend Miri Frankel (from IP licensing agency Beanstalk).

Right: who says army uniforms can't be fashionable ...?

Miri's clientele, improbably, spans a spectrum that ranges from Paris Hilton at one extreme to the US Army at the other -- and the Kat is going to do his best to get her to offer some transatlantic commentary for us quaint old Europeans ...


The IPKat has discovered the Lexsynergy Blog, launched by his friend Daniel Greenberg. Lexsynergy is Daniel's domain name protection business, but his blog -- which is so far quite lightly populated with posts -- welcomes visitors and indeed anyone who would like to enter into dialogue with him on domain-name related matters.


Another bit of blog-news: the IP Tango weblog, launched in June and written by a nine-person squad (of whom IPKat team member Jeremy is one), has finally reached the milestone of notching up its fiftieth email subscriber. IP Tango, which is happy to post items in English, Spanish and Portuguese, tries to cover IP developments all around Latin America, both in terms of law and business. So far it has posted over 60 news items and looks forward to increasing the pace of posting now that autumn approaches (or spring, in the southern hemisphere ...)