Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, room E10

Abstract
In the course of the ongoing shift in the online market from ownership to access-based models, platform services that provide access to content uploaded by their users play a major role in online content distribution. However, legal uncertainty regarding the liability of such platform services affects both rights holders, in their ability to negotiate appropriate remunerations, and content provider services, in their competition with platform services for users and revenues. Legal proceedings against platform services have not yet led to a sufficient clarification of the legal situation.

It remains unclear to which extent platform services engage in acts of communication to the public and making available and whether they can benefit from the liability exemption for hosts provided for in the E-Commerce Directive. On 14th September 2016 the EU Commission presented a proposal for a directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market taking up the current “transfer of value”-discussion, especially with the provisions in Article 13 and recital 38.

Against this background and irrespective of different legal positions on the issue of whether platform services are responsible for the licensing of musical works GEMA and YouTube recently signed an agreement enabling GEMA members to participate in the exploitation of their works and ending the legal proceedings between the parties.

About the author
Tobias Holzmüller, born 1975, studied history and law at the Universities of Glasgow, Montpellier, Heidelberg and New York (NYU, LL.M. 2007). He holds a PhD from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and served as a research scholar at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property law and Competition from 2004 to 2006. After being admitted as lawyer in 2007 he worked for the law firm Gleiss Lutz until 2012 in their Munich and Brussels offices. In this time Tobias focused on German and European antitrust law, copyright law and EU law.

Tobias joined GEMA in January 2013 as Director for Legal Affairs & General Counsel. Since 2016 he is also in charge of the German Society for Private Copying Collections in Germany (ZPÜ). He is a member of the Association of German Antitrust Lawyers and the German Society for Intellectual Property Rights (GRUR). He has published extensively on various topics of competition and copyright law and teaches Copyright Law at the University of Regensburg.

Speaker: Fabian Gaessler/Zhaoxin Pu
Taking the Crowd by the Hand - The Intermediary Role of Crowdfunding Platforms

Speaker: Matthias Schmitt
Does A Local Bias Exist in Equity Crowdfunding?

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This paper seeks to investigate to what extent European patent litigation has been harmonized across the Member States of the European Patent Convention. We introduce a divergent expectation model for patent infringement disputes, where both litigation and settlement are driven by patent quality, a function of both broadness and definiteness of the patent, with the technology-specific factor determining the relative weights. Under our model, patent holders and patent infringers decide whether to settle or litigate based on differences in perception of the patent's quality whereas at the trial stage it is the assessment of the absolute patent quality by the judge which decides the outcome of the case. We evaluate 1117 patent infringement and counterclaim decisions rendered by courts in the three largest patent-granting European countries - Germany, France, and the United Kingdom - between 2008 and 2012 to empirically test the hypotheses flowing from our model at the trial stage. Our preliminary findings point to significant differences in patent litigation outcomes by technology, industry, and jurisdiction. We particularly find evidence that patent litigation is technology-specific within and between countries. We seek to explain our results through an assessment of the value-specific patterns of the patent conflicts and thereby, find that the patent quality proxy we use significantly predicts the litigation outcome. (Authors: Raphael Zingg/Erasmus Elsner)

Contact person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room E10

Product positioning decisions are important strategic decisions managers make. Will the firm develop "high-end" products, priced above the average product in the marketplace or "low-end" products, priced lower than the average product in the market? We theorize and empricially investigate a high-end bias: the tendency to favor high-end over low-end projects in the absence of objective reasons for doing so. We conducted experimental investigations of managers' explicit versus implicit preferences for high- versus low-end. The core of these experimental studies is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which analyzes the relative association strength between two constructs in the participant's mind. We find that (1) decision makers implicitly, and without objective justification, prefer high-end over low-end innovation projects, (2) decision maker's implicit high-end bias affects their explicit decisions, and (3) firms introduce more high-end than low-end innovations despite no advantage in revenue.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Abstract

Kernpunkte des seit Ende 2009 von beiden Patentstreitkammern des Landgerichts München I praktizierten Münchner Verfahrens zur Stärkung des Patentstandortes München sind die Durchführung zweier Verhandlungstermine in der Sache und ein strenges Fristenregime. Ziel ist es, Patentinhabern in einem fairen und transparenten Verfahren schnellen und effektiven Rechtsschutz bereitzustellen.

Der Referent wird diesen Ansatz sowie dessen praktische Durchführung daraufhin untersuchen, ob sie dem Anspruch beider Parteien auf ein faires Verfahren gerecht werden.

Im Anschluss wird er die im Einvernehmen mit dem neuen Vorsitzenden der 21. Zivilkammer, Tobias Pichlmaier, neu gefassten „Hinweise zum Münchner Verfahren“ vorstellen und erläutern.

Dr. Matthias Zigann ist Vorsitzender Richter am Landgericht München I. Er leitet dort seit Dezember 2012 die 7. Zivilkammer (Patentstreitkammer). Nach seiner Promotion am Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb zum Thema „Entscheidungen inländischer Gerichte über ausländische gewerbliche Schutzrechte und Urheberrechte“ war er vier Jahre lang Staatsanwalt in Landshut, im Anschluss sechs Jahre lang Mitglied der 7. Zivilkammer des Landgerichts München I und zuletzt drei Jahre lang abgeordnet als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter an den X. Zivilsenat (Patentsenat) des Bundesgerichtshofs in Karlsruhe.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie in dieser Einladung.

Wir bitten um Anmeldung bis zum 23. November unter elisabeth.amler(at)ip.mpg.de.

Abstract:

In this paper I analyze spillover effects on the production of patents following episodes in which superstar inventors relocate to a new city. In particular, in order to distinguish whether local externalities have a restricted network dimension or a wider spatial breadth, I estimate changes in patterns of patenting activity for two different groups of inventors: the restricted group of coauthors of the superstar, and all other inventors in one urban area.

The analysis is performed for both the locality where the superstar moves and the one that is left. I restrict the attention to patent outputs that exclude any joint work with the superstar, so to isolate spillovers from complementarity effects.

The results from the event study evidence a large and persistent positive effect on the coauthors of the superstar who reside in the city of destination (averaging about 0.1 more patents per inventor each year), and a negative trend affecting those who live in the locality of departure. Conversely, no city-wide spillover effect can be attested, offering little support to place-based policies aimed at generating a positive local brain drain.

Contact person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Both organizational and sociological approaches in entrepreneurship research highlight the importance of social context ins haping individual preferences for entrepreneurship. An influential contextual factor that has not been studied in entrepreneurship research is one's boss at work. Do entrepreneurial bosses contribute to their employees' decisions to become entrepreneurs themselves? Using Danish register data of newly founded firms and their entrepreneurs and employees between 2003 and 2012, and employing methods that allow causal inferences, we show that entrepreneurial bosses indeed affect their employees' future entrepenruship choices, especially if both boss and employees are female. We investigate two alternative underlying mechanisms that may shape the (female) boss' influence on (female) workers' entrepreneurship decisions. Our resuls consistently suggest that entrepreneurial bosses may act as role models for the entrepreneurship activities of their employees, especially between pairs of female bosses and female employees. We do no find any evidence on female bosses acting as "queen bees" at the workplace. Female entrepreneurial bosses may, thus, act as a lever to reducing the gender gaps in entrepreneurship rates.