Too much travel and conferences, not enough blogging. Yesterday it was a conference on pharmaceuticals held in Beijing. The good news is that it was a short trip down to the China World Hotel. The bad news is that I was trying to cram all of China intellectual property law and enforcement issues into a 45-minute period of time. This was challenging and did not exactly do the topic justice, but you make do with what you have.

Intellectual property is one of those subjects where people either have some background and understand the "lingo" or have no clue. It is therefore extremely difficult sometimes to tailor a conference paper to the audience. Yesterday’s group, for example, were ostensibly folks from the pharmaceutical industry. If they routinely dealt with patents, then they were probably quite bored when I explained what the basics were in patent prosecution, and probably the enforcement stuff as well. If they were regulatory people, the IP talk probably put them to sleep. Moreover, research-based guys deal with patents, generic product people rely heavily on trademark protection.

I’ve been averaging one presentation per month, but with the holidays coming up, I think I’m due for a break. December looks to be (slightly) more restful than the last few months, at least as far as travel is concerned.