Prof. M.R.F. Senftleben

Martin Senftleben is Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Institute for Information Law (IViR), University of Amsterdam. His activities focus on the reconciliation of private intellectual property rights with competing public interests of a social, cultural or economic nature. Current research topics include generative AI systems and author remuneration; open science and digital autonomy of researchers; platform and digital ecosystem regulation; copyright data improvement and content recommender systems; quality journalism and the economic viability of public interest media; behavioural advertising and consumer empowerment; the development of sustainable intellectual property policy.

Professor Senftleben studied law at the University of Heidelberg. He worked as a researcher at IViR and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich. In 2004, he was awarded a Ph.D. by the University of Amsterdam. From 2004 to 2007, he was a legal officer in the trademarks, industrial designs and geographical indications law division of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva. From 2007 to 2020, he was Professor of Intellectual Property at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As a lawyer at Bird & Bird (2008 to 2019), he litigated copyright and trademark cases, including lawsuits about hyperlinking and website blocking.

Professor Senftleben is a member of the Benelux Council for Intellectual Property and a former member of the Copyright Advisory Committee of the Dutch State. He provided advice to WIPO in copyright, trademark and unfair competition projects. For the European Commission, he prepared studies on data access and reuse in research contexts. He is a member of the Trademark Law Institute (TLI), the European Copyright Society (ECS) and the Executive Committee of the Association littéraire et artistique internationale (ALAI). As a visiting professor, he was invited to the National University of Singapore, the Engelberg Center at NYU Law School, the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, Tel Aviv University and the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Xiamen University. His numerous publications include Copyright, Limitations and the Three-Step Test (2004), European Trade Mark Law (with Annette Kur, 2017), The Copyright/Trademark Interface (2020) and Generative AI and Author Remuneration (2023). As a guest lecturer, he provides courses at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), the Jagiellonian University Krakow and the University of Catania.