Veranstaltungen

The emergence and rapid advancement of new genomic techniques (NGTs) have sparked intense legal and policy debates in both health and agricultural biotechnology. NGTs allow for precise and efficient genetic modifications. In the health sector, the first CRISPR-based therapeutics are currently in development and testing, with broad global consensus around their transformative potential. In the agricultural sector, NGTs hold significant promise for enabling higher crop yields, greater varietal diversity, improved climate resilience, and reduced pesticide use.

Regulators have taken different stances towards NGTs. With respect to NGT plants, the United States and several other countries have adopted permissive frameworks that exempt NGT plants with minor genetic changes from strict GMO oversight. In contrast, the European Union, ruled in 2018 that all NGT plants fall under the 2001 GMO Directive - effectively treating them the same as traditional GMOs, subjecting NGT plants to a prohibitively costly and lengthy market authorization process. This stricter regulation of NGT plants has important implications for scientific innovation, investment, and the competitiveness of the EU. In response, the EU has initiated steps toward deregulation. In March 2025, the Council of the European Union agreed on a negotiating mandate for a revised regulatory framework on NGT plants.

Against this background, we will discuss the future of NGT regulation in Europe in two panels. The first panel will examine the scope and implications of the proposed EU deregulation compared to the current regime, with a focus on its impact on public and private sector research. The second panel will discuss one of the most contentious issues in ongoing negotiations: should NGT plants be eligible for patent protection? Across both panels, we will explore the broader consequences of regulatory choices for innovation, competition, and the future of biotechnology in Europe.

Konferenzbeschreibung als pdf (auf Englisch)

Tagungsprogramm als pdf (auf Englisch)
 

Online-Anmeldung

We study how political institutions shape global knowledge production from 1900 to the present. We assemble comprehensive data on universities, scientists, and discoveries worldwide and document how institutional quality influences science along several dimensions. First, stronger political institutions are associated with larger academic sectors, as measured by the number of universities and scientists. Second, researchers in countries with stronger institutions generate more scientific output, especially frontier research and Nobel Prize–winning discoveries. Event studies of sharp improvements and deteriorations in institutional quality confirm a large impact of institutions on scientific productivity. Third, democracies foster frontier research even after holding constant the size of the academic workforce, indicating that their advantages extend beyond scale. Finally, political institutions shape the scope of inquiry: autocracies restrict research to a narrower set of fields, producing excellence in some areas but lacking the broad exploration of ideas that characterizes democracies.

Ansprechpartner: Michael Rose

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

In this talk, I intend to explore various ways in which intellectual property law can be adapted in order to accommodate the challenges posed by AI, and what its underlying structure reveals about the legal system’s conception of agency, control, and responsibility. After briefly reviewing the current state of the debate concerning copyright and patent eligibility for AI-assisted outputs, I propose a test with which to apply the principles of the existing doctrine to AI-related cases. I argue that the proposed test is consistent with the broader logic of legal responsibility across various domains of law, be it with respect to obligations (e.g., tort liability) or entitlements (e.g., IP rights), and that it tracks an agent's ability to envision and shape specific outcomes. 

From there, I reflect on what IP's (and the legal system's) implicit theory of agency suggests about the kinds of responsibility AI systems can and cannot bear, and sketch a broader proposal for grounding both fault-based and strict liability in the relationship between an agent's choice of outcomes and the agent's control over the risks associated with those outcomes. The proposed framework could provide a more principled basis for strict liability and help explain why strict liability for harms arising from AI systems with high levels of autonomy and/or emergent behavior is justified. 

I conclude by briefly considering how IP's treatment of identity and expression could help address other pressing challenges in AI policy—for example, using the concept of appropriation of likeness to prohibit the nonconsensual use of personal data in training generative models that produce deepfake pornography, even when the individuals concerned are not directly or recognizably depicted in the output. 

Jonathan Iwry is a Fellow at the Accountable AI Lab at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His work focuses on the philosophical challenges posed by AI and other emerging technologies for foundational legal concepts. He has authored or co-authored scholarly work on topics that include machine learning in psychological language analysis, the ethics of noninvasive brain stimulation, the legal implications of the metaverse, FDA’s use of its emergency powers during the COVID-19 pandemic, behavioral economics in drug policy, and the law of outer space. His work has been published in the Food and Drug Law Journal, Bloomberg Law, Psychological Methods, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, the Negotiation Journal (of Harvard's Program on Negotiation), and the Oxford Handbook of Secularism. He was previously a corporate associate at the law firm Ropes & Gray LLP. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School and B.A., summa cum laude, in Philosophy and History from the University of Pennsylvania. During law school, he served as a Teaching Fellow in two Harvard College courses—Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course and Joshua Greene’s course on AI ethics—and received awards from the university for excellence in teaching. He is also a Technology, Law, and Policy Fellow at the Center for the Future of AI, Mind & Society at Florida Atlantic University. He moonlights as a freestyle rap artist and is an eleven-time winner of the Supreme Bars rap tournament in Brooklyn.

Firms rely on academic science and actively participate in the production of scientific knowledge. However, the impact of industry on academic science remains unclear. This study utilizes the site selection decisions of “Million Dollar Plants” (MDPs) to estimate the causal effects of industry on academic science. I compare the responses of scientists in counties that successfully attracted MDPs (“winners”) with those in counties that narrowly missed out on these MDPs (“runners-up”). The arrival of an MDP in a “winner” county shifts research of local scientists toward topics relevant to the firm, but not at the expense of either the quantity or quality of their work. This shift in research direction is not primarily driven by direct funding or collaboration. Instead, it occurs immediately after the announcement but before the physical establishment of these plants and is more likely to affect scientists without prior experience in commercialization. These findings indicate that scientists are refocusing their attention toward more applied and firm-relevant research.

Ansprechperson: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

In China, most legal disputes concerning unauthorized data scraping from online platforms are adjudicated under the framework of the Anti-Unfair Competition Law, particularly through the application of its general clause. In earlier judicial practice, courts interpreted this general clause in a manner that effectively granted platform data a level of protection akin to property rights. However, recent developments indicate a shift: fostering innovation has emerged as a key consideration in determining whether unauthorized data scraping constitutes unfair competition. This suggests that courts are beginning to balance platform data protection against the imperative of encouraging innovation. This study examines recent judicial practices in China concerning data scraping from online platforms, explicates the courts’ reasoning, and argues that although the incorporation of innovation into the legal balancing framework is a promising step, a narrowly construed understanding of innovation undermines the ability to genuinely achieve that goal.

Ziwei Cheng is an Associate Professor at the Law School, Shenzhen University. Her research focuses on anti-unfair competition law, with particular emphasis on data related issues and digital market regulation.

Moderation: Dr. Klaus Wiedemann

Open source is key to innovation yet is assumed to be done largely through intrinsic motivation. How can we incentivize it? In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled organizations and individuals alike to pay developers for their open source work. We study this program by collecting fine-grained data on nearly 100,000 GitHub users, their activities, and sponsorship events. We first, using a difference-in-differences approach, document two main effects. One, developers who opted into the program, an action that does not itself entail a financial reward, increased their output after the program’s launch. Two, the actual receipt of a financial sponsorship has a long-lasting negative effect on two measures of innovation –repository creation and community-oriented tasks– but not in coding effort. Despite a net positive effect on innovation, sponsorship appears to crowd out intrinsic motivation, shifting effort toward self-promoting activities. Results from a pre-registered survey and experiment reinforce these findings, showing that modest sponsorship (USD 20) deters collaborative contributions compared to no compensation, larger rewards (USD 1000), or company sponsorships.

Ansprechpartner: Daehyun Kim

Eintragung in den Einladungsverteiler und mehr Informationen auf der Seminarseite.

Open Source AI: Strategic Motives for the Selective Revealing of AI System Components
Presenter: Leonard Hanschur (TUM)
Discussant: Ulrike Morgalla (MPI)

The recent open revealing of numerous AI systems challenges the notion that the exclusivity of an AI system’s data and model constitutes a source of competitive advantage. We explore the mechanisms behind revealing AI and the characteristics of AI systems associated with it. Specifically, we examine two dimensions of the selective revealing of AI systems: Its completeness, describing which components are revealed (none, the model, or model and data), and its degree determined by the license type (proprietary, restrictive, permissive). Employing a mixed-methods approach, we draw on 24 interviews with decision-makers at AI-focused organizations and prior theory to construct hypotheses that we empirically test on a sample of 659 AI systems. We hypothesize, and find supported in the data, that organizations tend to reveal larger and more innovative models to a lesser degree and less completely. Further, we find that data modality shapes revealing completeness, and that model size moderates this association. These findings suggest, in line with our qualitative findings, that revealing AI system components serves to promote their adoption and to establish a lock-in across AI system versions rather than collaborative development. Our study contributes to the academic discourse on open innovation and competitive advantage. For strategists and policymakers, we provide guidance in navigating their pathways toward opening AI.

Strategic Reserves: Shelved Innovation as a Real Option
Presenter: Elisabeth Hofmeister (MPI)
Discussant: Denzel Glandel (ISTO)

I investigate the role of shelved innovation - R&D projects suspended despite promising results - in firms’ strategy, drawing on evidence from the pharmaceutical industry. Initially, I construct a novel dataset linking clinical trials to their published results, enabling the systematic identification of shelved drug development projects. Using the exogenous nature of trial failures, I evaluate whether firms restart shelved projects following project failures in the same market. The results show that firms restart shelved projects in response to late-stage failures in Phase III clinical trials. Further, I find that the decision to restart is moderated by the thickness of the market for technology and the firm’s level of co-specialized complementary assets. Overall, these findings demonstrate that shelved innovation is not merely an incidental byproduct of the R&D process but a strategically managed asset.

Selective Promotion of Complements on Online Auction Platforms: Evidence from the Automotive Industry
Presenter: Alexey Rusakov (ISTO)
Discussant: Tim Hahne (TUM)

Platforms can steer demand by selectively promoting complements in platform markets. But how does selective promotion affect the overall demand when the products are idiosyncratic, such as on auction platforms, and does this effect differ for similar products and a competing platform? By studying a car auction platform with unique cars, we find that promotional car reviews on YouTube positively affect the prices and bid volumes of reviewed cars in the same category. However, the latter effect is largely due to short-term attention spillovers, while the sentiment of the reviews can have unexpected consequences for the bid prices. Moreover, the effect on the competing platform is rather limited and probably only occurs when users first visit the focal platform and then switch to the competing platform.

Ansprechpartnerin: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Pratap Devarapalli, Ph.D., wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an der TC Bernie School of Law der University of Queensland, Australien, wird sein kürzlich erschienenes Buch vorstellen: Bioinked Boundaries – Patenting 3D Bioprinted Tissues, Organs and Bioinks: An US, European and Australian Patent Law Perspective.

In seinem Vortrag wird Pratap Devarapalli insbesondere auf die Perspektive der EU eingehen.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ullrich

Veranstaltungssprache ist Englisch.

Abstract:
3D bioprinting, a technology that allows for the creation of human tissues and, potentially, entire organs, stands at the cutting edge of innovation in the life sciences. Three-dimensional bioprinting involves the use of bioinks, composed of living stem cells, to print complex organic structures layer by layer, mimicking the architecture of biological tissues. The implications for industrial applications are varied and the potential financial impact and human benefit are staggering. For example, in medicine bioprinted tissues could revolutionise drug testing, eliminate the need for animal models, and aim to offer solutions to the global organ shortage. Bioprinted tissues, much like genetically modified organisms, involve both natural materials and human intervention. However, as with many biotechnological advancements, the legal questions that surround bioprinting  are equally complex. Can a tissue printed from living cells be considered an invention? How much modification is required to transform a biological material into something that qualifies as patentable subject matter? And how should courts and patent offices balance the need to protect innovation with the need to ensure public access to important medical technologies?