Institute News

Silke von Lewinski, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, has been appointed as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zagreb. Her research and teaching focuses on European, international and comparative copyright law, including challenges of new technologies. She will continue working at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich as well.

Silke von Lewinski is the author and co-author of several reference works, including the monograph “International Copyright Law and Policy” (Oxford/OUP 2008, Chinese edn. 2017) and the commentaries “European Copyright Law: A Commentary” (with Walter, Oxford/OUP 2010) and “The WIPO Treaties on Copyright” (with Reinbothe, Oxford/OUP, 2^nd ed. 2015). Her numerous publications have appeared in more than 15 languages. She is also President of ALAI (Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale) Germany and Vice President of ALAI.

In addition to teaching at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), she has frequently held visiting professorships and other teaching positions, inter alia at the universities of Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne, Sud), Toulouse, Madrid, Québec, Montreal, Melbourne, Wuhan and Beijing. She was the First Walter Minton Visiting Scholar at Columbia University School of Law in New York, the First Distinguished Visitor to the IP Research Institute of Australia and The Hosier Distinguished Visiting IP Scholar at DePaul University in Chicago.

As a legal expert to the European Commission, she drafted the Rental Right Directive’s proposal and was a member of the EC delegation at the WIPO Diplomatic Conference 1996 (outcome: WCT, WPPT). At the WIPO Diplomatic Conferences 2012 (outcome: Beijing Treaty) and 2013 (outcome: Marrakesh Treaty), she was Deputy Head of Delegation for Germany. Starting in 1995, she was chief legal expert to governments of Eastern and Central European and former Soviet countries on their copyright legislation. In particular, in 2003, she advised the Croatian government on copyright to pave the way for accession to the EU.

His research in the field of unfair competition law was groundbreaking and prepared European harmonisation. As its first editor, he initiated the leading “Schricker Commentary”, which has ever since been the indispensable reference book for both researchers and practitioners in German copyright law. As regards legal policy, Gerhard Schricker, who is also celebrating his golden jubilee as a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society this year, has consistently been aiming to promote the protection of the weaker party in the law. Accordingly, he has always been advocating the consumer-orientation of unfair competition law and, as a co-author of the so-called “Professorenentwurf”, prepared the way for the adoption of the German copyright contract law.

Gerhard Schricker inspired many Ph.D. students, who nowadays occupy leading positions at universities and in practice. Moreover, his leadership in navigating the Institute through difficult times and in preparing it for the future is among his major achievements. Especially for the latter, the current Directors of the Institute are deeply indebted to Gerhard Schricker.

A more detailed laudation authored by Ansgar Ohly can be found in the June issue of GRUR International or online here.

On December 14 Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Joseph Straus will celebrate his 80th birthday. He has for decades been one of the world's leading and most respected research personalities in intellectual property law with a clear focus on patent law.

After completing his law studies at the University of Ljubljana in 1962, Joseph Straus moved to Munich. As the first doctoral candidate of Friedrich-Karl Beier, he obtained his doctorate in 1968 at the University of Munich with a dissertation on competition law in Yugoslavia. In 1977, Joseph Straus took over the Yugoslavia Department at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law under its director Friedrich-Karl Beier. After his habilitation at the University of Ljubljana in 1986, Joseph Straus was appointed titular professor there in the field of intellectual property law. At the beginning of the 1990s, Joseph Joseph Straus also taught at the Law Faculty of the University of Munich, where, to this day, as an honorary professor, he continues to supervise a large number of doctoral students.

Joseph Straus earned his worldwide reputation as a legal scholar first and foremost through his intensive research on forward-looking topics, primarily in patent law, at the Max Planck Institute. In 2001 he was appointed Director of the Institute - where he joined the sitting Director Gerhard Schricker.

In managing the newly established Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in 2003 and 2004, he was not only responsible for repositioning the Institute to meet new challenges. He also took on the demanding responsibility of establishing the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), with its internationally leading Master's Degree program in intellectual property law. In close cooperation with the University of Augsburg, the Technical University of Munich and the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Joseph Straus led the MIPLC until his official retirement from the Institute in 2008. The success of this one-year degree course in its first 15 years, and the program's enormous international appeal, are due not only to a worldwide network of over 300 alumni but also in large part to the enthusiasm and strategic skills of its founder, Joseph Straus.

Retiring to a contemplative, private life is not in the nature of Joseph Straus. He continues to publish widely and is still a highly requested speaker at conferences all over the world. Among his many foreign research and teaching positions, consultancies in international organizations and activities in scientific organizations and societies, those deserving particular mention include his visiting professorships at Cornell Law School (1989 to 1998), the University of Toronto (2005), George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (2001 to present) and Tsinghua University in Shanghai (2015 to 2017) and his appointment to a research professorship (2011 to 2016) at the University of South Africa (UNISA).

Joseph Straus is a corresponding member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (since 1995) and a member of the Academia Europea (since 2001). In addition, Joseph Straus was co-editor of GRUR Int. and President of the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP) (1993 to 1995), longtime Vice President and member of the GRUR Executive Committee, and finally chair of the AIPPI Program Committee and chair of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO). His scientific advice has been requested by the OECD, WIPO, UNCTAD, the European Patent Office, the German Ministry of Justice and the Legal Service of the German Bundestag, as well as by the European Commission as a member of the Expert Group on Biotechnological Inventions.

The award of the Science Prize of the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft in the year 2000 stands out among his scientific honors. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by both the University of Ljubljana (2001) and the University of Kragujevac (2003). He was also honored by the University of Xiamen, Huangzhong University for Science and Technology (HUST) in Wuhan, and Tongji University in Shanghai as Honorary Professor. Joseph Straus is a bearer of the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2005) and of the Slovenian Order of Merit (2010).

The Institute honoured its former director with a special event in the patent law lecture series followed by a reception on December 18. The evening’s speakers were close and long-term companions of the honoree.  Prof. Dr. Rudolf Kraßer, Dr. Rainer Moufang, Prof. Dr. Bojan Pretnar and Wolrad Prinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont spoke on particularly important topics of intellectual property law that are still a part of Joseph Straus’ research work today.

Updated 12/19/2018

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.

Link to personal page of Marco Botta

Arnold Picot was Professor Emeritus of the Munich School of Management (LMU Munich), where he taught and carried out his research since 1987. He was a close friend to the institute as well as a committed supporter, teacher, advisor, and mentor to many colleagues and students. He was one of the initiators of the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (IMPRS-CI) which marks a first significant step towards the establishment of the department for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research. Since 2014, he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

The institute has lost a well-respected and warm-hearted colleague. He will be sadly missed and held in grateful memory.
 

He succeeds Dietmar Harhoff, who held this position since 2015.

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.