One of the important aspects of any great conference is the networking that goes on. However, this rarely gets listed in articles about conferences. For the journalistic types, it isn’t especially newsworthy. Yet it actually fits quite nicely with blogging. So, with that, let me highlight some of the people that I ran into at the conference yesterday.

The first session I went to was Mike Godwin doing his spectacular introduction to constitutional law for geeks. I took copious notes and may write up a more detailed post about that session later on. For those acquainted with Godwin’s law, the session was small enough to avoid any direct reference to Nazi’s.

Via Twitter, Jon Lebkowsky joined in. Jon has been to many CFPs in the past, but couldn’t make it this year. I first got to know Jon through Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid and have remained friends ever since. Also at Mike’s session were Nancy Scola and David Isenberg. Both of whom I’ve know for quite a while through blogging and it was great to catch up with them. Nancy introduced me to Jennifer Mercurio, Government Affairs Director of Entertainment Consumers Association. We had a good brief talk about Second Life, the Video Gamers Voter Network, and related issues, and I hope to follow up on these discussions going forward.

In the evening, there was a reception which included Jack Balkin. Jack, of course, was in constant demand, and I didn’t speak with him as much as I would have liked. However, I did have a great discussion with Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office. He will be the keynote speaker on Thursday and I look forward to hearing him then. I mentioned Epic and my experiences at UBS which seems to fit nicely with his talk. We talked a little bit about the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”, and pondered whether the actions of the RIAA or MPAA were really promoting the progress of science and useful arts.

I also picked up ‘Scenarios for the Future” published by the European Patent Office and look forward to reading it.

As the evening wore down, I also spoke with Gavin Baker, Ben Masel, and several other people.

I’m sure there will be plenty of additional interesting networking today. As a quick comment to anyone from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, Wordless Wednesday, BlogExplosion, or other sites that bring people to my site for very quick visits, if you’ve made it this far thank you. I would also encourage you to follow the links to some of the folks I met yesterday. You might not get an EntreCard credit, but you might find some very interesting write.