Academic positions for IP PhDs: (What's the story) academic glory?

Merpel has always had a passion for investigative journalism, especially if applied to notoriously intriguing IP stories. After a little gentle reflection, she has decided to seek the opinion of those who follow this weblog in relation to current state of affairs regarding one of its liveliest groups of readers -- those bright and enthusiastic souls who aspire to become intellectual property academics. This is what she says:

Even with her three IP Doctorates, Tiddles
still spends long, long nights filling in those
application forms and dreaming on ...
"Having a PhD [or equivalent experience … but let’s leave this aside for the time being] has become a basic requirement for anyone who wishes to pursue a career in academia. Getting one's paws on a scholarship in order to fund one’s doctoral studies is a difficult task, but not an impossible one. If you want evidence that this is so, it's not hard to find. Just take a look at the website of the recently-launched Glasgow-based CREATe centre, for example, and you'll see that there are quite a few opportunities out there. However, if your goal is to make the great leap from PhD research to becoming an IP academic, you’ll soon realise that, in the vast majority of instances, opportunity seems to stop right there where it starts, with PhD studentships.

"I'll never make it ..."
From being a niche area of the law, IP has increasingly become a relevant subject in most university curriculums [or is it curricula? Never mind, so long as there are syllabuses and not syllabi ...]; it is also generally an extremely popular subject, which many students clamour to study, resulting in the publication of an ever-increasing number of student textbooks in the field. However, the number of IP lectureships (which de facto means getting a permanent position) advertised is nowhere near as great as the number of scholarships offered for those wishing to undertake doctoral IP research. Sadly, while a growing number of young IP enthusiasts seek to embark their PhD adventures, no-one is brave enough to make it plain to these doctors-to-be that it will be heartbreakingly difficult for most of them ever to find a job in academia afterwards, even after securing one or two post-doctoral research positions.

Got the job!
Merpel therefore innocently wonders about current state of affairs. Are there simply not enough teaching positions for IP academics, so maybe we should be thinking of creating more of them? Or is there so much IP research needing to be done that we need far more research scholars than IP lecturers and professors, but we have to recognise that the only way to recruit them is to offer the prospect of an academic teaching position which most of them will have scarcely a sniff of getting? Or do we need so many PhD scholars to do the research because we have burdened the "real" academic staff with so much marking and administration that they don't have time to do their own research any more? What do readers think?"