Institute News

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition celebrated the 50th birthday of the German Copyright Act on September 9, 2015 with a book presentation: on September 21 the special publication entitled “50 Jahre Urheberrechtsgesetz – Vom Magnettonband zu Social Media” (“50 Years of Copyright Law – From Magnetic Tape to Social Media”) was presented to Heiko Maas, Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection.

After words of welcome from Institute Director Reto M. Hilty; his co-editor Thomas Dreier; and the book’s publisher, owner of Verlag C.H.Beck, Hans Dieter Beck, the Justice Minister – the “patron” of German copyright – received a copy of the festschrift hot off the press. Besides taking a look at the past five decades, the volume, which Dreier and Hilty co-edited and co-authored together with some 30 contributors including scholars, practitioners and officials, also focuses particularly on the need for legislative action in the future.

In the Justice Minister’s subsequent speech, in which he identified the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition as “the most important European think tank for intellectual property and copyright”, Maas described current copyright issues, forayed into the history of copyright law and concluded by formulating various working hypotheses for the copyright policy of the future.

Addressing the central points of national copyright policy, Maas named four current projects: copyright contract law, the reform of the law governing collective rights management organisations, the education and research exception and the adaptation of copyright law to the demands of the digital age.
Maas offered thanks to Institute Director Josef Drexl and his team for their dedicated support of the reform of the law on collective rights management organisations: “You really supported our negotiations on the Directive in Brussels and our work on the draft law. Your know-how in this difficult area, which is legally and technically very complex, was very helpful for us.”

The Max Planck Institute also plays a special role in the adaptation of copyright to the phenomenon of digitalisation, said Maas: So as to lay a better empirical foundation for the legal policy discussions, the Justice Ministry commissioned Dietmar Harhoff, the Institute’s Managing Director and head of its economics department – not in attendance due to a trip to Japan – together with Reto Hilty to perform an interdisciplinary study. While Harhoff’s team collected data to find out which business models are current among founders and how business founders treat copyright-protected content – and thus copyright itself – Hilty performed the legal assessment of the data.
The Justice Minister’s speech was followed by 45 minutes of discussion, in which several audience members participated. Maas answered Hilty’s closing question of what request he would make of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition with the admonition: “think the impossible”.
Hilty expressed satisfaction with the event, which drew 170 guests, most of them German copyright experts, to the Institute and closed with a reception: “I am amazed at all the different participants – we certainly chose a hot topic!”.

The participants also deemed the event a success: “Copyright must continue to be protected in the best way possible taking into consideration the constant technological developments – as a patent engineer, I would like to do my part”, said Peter Anders of Grünecker Patent Attorneys and Attorneys-at-Law. “Today I had the opportunity to learn about further developments in the field, and I will incorporate that into my work. Your event gave me an excellent chance to do that and also to network with colleagues”, Anders added.

Speech of Heiko Maas, Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection

Speech of Prof. Hilty

Speech of Prof. Dreier

For the past several decades, Wolfgang Fikentscher was recognized internationally as one of Germany's great legal scholars. After his studies in Erlangen and Munich, his career path led through the Universities of Münster and Tübingen to a professorship at the Faculty of Law of the University of Munich. Parallel to his function as External Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, he chaired the Commission for Studies in Cultural Anthropology within the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. He was also the Director of the Munich Office of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. His wide range of international experience included LL.M. studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, as well as guest professorships and fellowships in places as diverse as Georgetown University, Ann Arbor, Yale, Nanjing, the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Study, the Santa Fe Institute and not least at the University of California at Berkeley, where several years into his retirement he still regularly taught law and anthropology. Among the many honors he received are an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, the German Order of Merit First Class, the Bavarian Order of Merit and a Max Planck Research Prize for the research in law and anthropology he carried out with his friend Robert Cooter.

Wolfgang Fikentscher actively promoted many young scholars. With his vision and his wealth of ideas, he enriched the thinking of many students and doctoral candidates. Up until his death he always enjoyed exchanging ideas with the many scholarship holders and guest researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

To describe Wolfgang Fikentscher as an expert in civil law and economic law, as a methodologist and a legal anthropologist, would not do full justice to his work. This work reflects not only an astonishingly wide range of interests both within law and across disciplines, but also his incredible visionary power. His central publications were regularly ahead of their time.

This is also true of the projects he conducted in association with the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Long before competition law was fully established as a field of research at the Institute in 2002, it was he who promoted the conviction that research in intellectual property law needed to be complemented by competition law. For many years, he headed a research group at the Institute on the transfer of technology. Among his great accomplishments in this area are his two-volume textbook on national, European and international economic law (Wirtschaftsrecht), which was translated into Chinese, his collaboration with UNCTAD on the development and drafting of a Code of Conduct on Transfer of Technology (TOT Code), and finally the text prepared on his initiative by an international group of scholars for an international competition law agreement (Draft International Antitrust Code) in 1993. This so-called "Munich Code" grew out of his firm belief that, ultimately, even the emerging WTO system needs binding competition rules.

In the years following his retirement, Professor Emeritus Wolfgang Fikentscher was most passionate about law and anthropology. His endeavor in this field to always conceptualize legal issues concerning the regulation of the economy from the perspective of the individual, by taking into account the individual's freedom to act and his or her roots in a certain culture, stands for Wolfgang Fikentscher the humanist. His conviction that the economy too must have rules to ensure that business serves people, and not the other way around, has found renewed support in the wake of the latest banking and economic crises. Wolfgang Fikentscher never stopped working to find solutions to the fundamental economic problems of mankind. In one of his last contributions, under the title "FairEconomy", he proposed an alternative approach to respond to the current economic and financial crisis by particularly building on his anthropological insights.

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition mourns the loss of a great scholar and a highly dedicated and supportive colleague whose openness to new ideas, diverse cultures and human beings in particular will be remembered by all. His sudden death fills us with sorrow. We extend our condolences to his family, above all to his wife Irmgard and his children and grandchildren.

On February 25, 2015, the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation chaired by Prof. Dietmar Harhoff, Ph.D., Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation, has presented the eighth report on research, innovation and technological performance in Germany to the German chancellor Angela Merkel. The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) provides scientific advice to the German Federal Government and periodically delivers reports on research, innovation and technological productivity in Germany. A key task is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the German innovation system in an international comparison. Furthermore, Germany's perspectives as a location for research and innovation are evaluated on the basis of the latest research findings. EFI presents proposals for national research and innovation policy.

Martin Husovec, a scholarship holder and an IMPRS-CI doctoral candidate at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, has been named Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society (CIS) for 2014-2016. Within his affiliation project, Martin Husovec will work on acquainting a broader audience with his doctoral research on the optimal accountability of Internet intermediaries for third-party wrongdoing in the field of intellectual property law. More »

Henri de Belsunce, former scholarship holder at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, was awarded the "Brenno Galli Award" at the "SIDE (Italian Society of Law and Economics) 2014 Rome Conference" in December 2014 for his paper "Do more patents mean less entry? Patenting strategies in cumulative innovation under the threat of litigation".

View paper »

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As of January 1st, 2015, Dietmar Harhoff, Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Innovation and Competition and head of the economics department "Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research", takes over the management of the Institute through biennial rotation, succeeding Josef Drexl who held this position since 2013.

Senior Research Fellow and Head of Unit at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Annette Kur, was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki (Finnland),, "for her major contributions to European intellectual property law, especially within the fields of trade mark and design law" at the end of November.

The honorary doctorate is conferred every five years on persons who "based on scientific, cultural or social activities of great merit can be considered worthy of this distinction". Together with a group of experts at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Kur has greatly influenced industrial design legislation in the European Union, for instance by co-writing the report on the "Overall Evaluation of the Functioning of the European Trade Mark System", which has formed the basis of the pending Commission proposal for the reform of European trade mark law.

Alongside Kur, Edward Freeman, Professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business (USA), and Oz Shy, PhD, Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston (USA), were awarded the honorary doctorate for their academic achievements.

Hanken School of Economics, founded in 1909, is a leading, internationally accredited (Equis and AMBA) university in the field of economics and business administration. It is one of the oldest business schools in the Nordic countries and maintains close and intensive links with the business world. At its two campuses in Helsinki and Vaasa it offers academic programs on all levels (BSc, MSc and PhD).

Magdalena Streicher, doctoral candidate with exploratory focus on "Entrepreneurship" at the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition since October 2014, was awarded the Appreciation Prize from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy for her excellent achievements in the framework of her master studies in "International Management / CEMS" at the Vienna University of Economics and Business at the end of November.

The prize, endowed with EUR 2,500, is awarded annually at the recommendation of the Austrian universities and the conference of the technical colleges to their best graduates of the previous academic year. Two groups are eligible: on the one hand, persons who, under the auspices of the Austrian president, complete a doctorate, and on the other hand graduates of diploma and master programs. The requirement for the latter group is the completion of the diploma examination or the bachelor and master examination, respectively, with honors, as well as an excellent and best-rated diploma or master thesis, respectively. The Appreciation Prize is meant to make visible and honor top performance during academic studies and, at the same time, to be a stimulus for young academics.

In her master thesis "Diversity and Innovation: Which factors besides the demographic diversity of the founding team influence the innovation capability of a new company?" Streicher used a case study to analyse the dynamic of homogeneous founder teams. The thesis shows that the cognitive capabilities to integrate new knowledge in the company, to generate ideas and to identify opportunities are shaped much more by a variety of personal features and mindsets than by the demographic diversity of the founding team.

On August 1, 2014, the fourth amendment of the "Gesetz für den Ausbau erneuerbarer Energien" (Renewable Energy Law, or EEG, for short), came into effect. The EEG regulates the preferred feeding of electricity produced from renewable sources into the power grid and guarantees the producers a fixed remuneration. According to the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy), the amendment eliminates weaknesses of the former law and adapts unrealistic development goals in the field of renewable energies. At the invitation of the Munich-based Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and within the framework of the seminar series "[IP]2 - Intellectual Property in Practice", on October 15, 2014, six experts from science and practice discussed with an audience of around 50 knowledgeable persons - bankers, auditors, lawyers, start-up entrepreneurs und doctoral candidates in the engineering sciences - the possible effects of the EEG amendment on innovations in the technological, entrepreneurial and procedural area. The event's organizers, Christian Steinle and Alexandru Steininger of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, were very pleased with the evening, which ended with a reception: "We investigate innovation processes and we wanted the experts to spin visions and scenarios. To this purpose the precise effects of the amendment, which will only be visible from the year 2016 on, have to be awaited. But with these experts we succeeded in looking beyond the dry content of the law and in sharpening their view for possible effects of the amendment on clean-tech innovations".