Founding Partners

The Munich Intellectual Property Law Center cooperation project is an academic center jointly run by the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, the University of Augsburg, the Technical University of Munich, and The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (USA). These institutions have joined their skills and resources in order to offer the best possible education and the most outstanding research in the area of intellectual property - the law of innovation, creativity and competition.

Four partners from two continents have joined forces in an extraordinary venture.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition

Since its foundation in 1966, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (formerly Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law) has been the leading research institution in the area of intellectual property rights. For decades the Institute has attracted generations of leading IP scholars from all over the world to conduct research in its inspiring atmosphere, which includes the richest specialized library in the world. Many leading text books and commentaries, which long ago became dominant in the IP area, were produced at the Institute.

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition contributes various resources such as facilities, administrative infrastructure and lecturers to the MIPLC. All MIPLC students have full access to the institute's library, the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in IP.

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition is one of 83 institutes of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Sciences, one of Germany's foremost research conglomerates.

University of Augsburg

The University of Augsburg was founded in 1970. It is one of the new, modern universities in Bavaria. Today, some 20,000 students attend the University of Augsburg. On campus, interdisciplinary cooperation is a daily feature of research and teaching at the university, and each faculty develops new forms of teaching to intensify and accelerate learning. The law school has built up an excellent reputation for research in areas such as European and international (economic) law, competition, or WTO law.

Universität Augsburg

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Since its inception in 1868, TUM has established its reputation as a foremost academic institution with 6 Nobel prizes and many other prestigious awards. Since 2006, TUM is a German University of Excellence. TUM covers a large spectrum of research and studies from engineering, natural and life sciences and medicine to economics. TUM School of Management bridges business administration, economics and law with natural sciences and engineering and is actively involved in the MIPLC.

The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. (USA)

With its renowned law school, GW has been a leader in intellectual property education and scholarship for more than a hundred years. When the Law School established a Master's of Patent Law program in 1895, its alumni had already written the patents for Bell's telephone, Mergenthaler's linotype machine, and Eastman's roll film camera, among hundreds of other inventions, and dozens more alumni had worked in the Patent Office. Over the intervening century, GW Law has bolstered its expertise in patent law with complementary strengths in copyright, trademark, communications, computer and internet regulation, electronic commerce, and genetics and medicine.

GW Law organizes an annual IP Summer School at the premises of the MIPLC that brings professors and students from the USA and other countries to Munich.