I have just wangled my way into a part-time but actual, real, show-me-the-money job, writing about intellectual property rights, for this recently launched new website-stroke-blog (at their website they call it a "website" so as not to frighten anyone) run by the Centre for the New Europe.

The Centre for the New Europe is run by a friend of mine, but despite that it is an old-school Think Tank, with an office, with a long, winding corridor with lots of different rooms attached to it, lots of computers crammed with databases, several photocopiers, numerous telephones. It holds meetings and organises events. If you play your cards right, it might even serve you a free lunch. It plans months and for some purposes years in advance. It has a Business Plan, full of Objectives, which to an extraordinary degree (i.e. sometimes) it actually achieves. Solitary maniac in bedsit attached to one computer ranting with extreme eccentricity three or four times per day about you-never-know-what-the-hell next (i.e. a blogger) it is not.

I am to do one posting for this new blog-stroke-website per week, and that leaves me no space to indulge in public self-education. My job is to help readers to educate themselves, about intellectual property, by plugging them into useful stuff, not by engulfing them in my own intellectual confusions. (Because frankly, I'm unclear where I stand on this issue.)

I have been hired because of my general blog "presence", and presumably because it is reckoned that I can write, rather than because of any special knowledge of IP. I will help to make this new blog work by linking to from Samizdata, and by reporting on interesting IP debates in the blogosphere generally, rather than by contributing anything very special or original myself. Me being me I am bound to mouth off sooner or later, but I aim to curb that tendency, certainly to begin with.

But I do need that IP self-education nevertheless, and I intend to use this blog (along with all my usual kind of stuff) to do some of that. As I get into the subject I will also do IP self-education at Samizdata, once I've arrived at some genuinely interesting questions.

So, what I'm saying is, I need, if any readers here are able to supply such things, links to recent IP debates and articles and discussions, in blogs and elsewhere (anywhere linkable to), with particular emphasis on recent. Heartiest thanks in anticipation. Even a tiny few useful links would be of immense value (only one posting a week, remember) and even if they don't have any visible consequences over at CNE-IP, they will still be valuable to me and will still be hugely appreciated.