Martin Schaefer

Background

About Martin Schaefer

Dr. jur. Martin Schaefer studied law at the universities of Saarbrücken and Berlin and began his career as assistant to his mentor, Professor Dr. Wilhelm Nordemann. From the beginning of the 1990s, he was working for the German recording industry associations (German National Group of IFPI and BPW – both jointly acting as BVMI today). As General Counsel, and from 1998 as Managing Director (CEO), Dr. Schaefer was responsible for such areas as combating piracy, public policy issues with an emphasis on representing industry interests in copyright policy, the development of future oriented industry projects and collecting society issues. In 2001, he moved to BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) as Vice President, Legal Counsel Europe. In this position, he was integrated into the European management team before leaving the company at the beginning of 2004 in order to apply his knowledge and experience in as lawyer. Dr. Schaefer has specialized in copyright law with an emphasis on music industry matters, collective and individual administration of rights, public policy issues, electronic media law and tradmark law. He is chairman of the Advisory Committee of the German Music Archive (a department of the German National Library), member of the board of ALAI Germany, member of the Copyright Committee of GRUR (German Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property) and member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the copyright journal ZUM (Zeitschrift für Urheber- und Medienrecht). Dr. Schaefer is contributing to leading commentaries on German copyright law, such as Fromm/ Nordemann, Urheberrecht (“Copyright”, currently 11th ed.) and Wandtke/ Bullinger, Urheberrecht (currently 4th ed.), has authored or co-authored books on copyright issues and has published a great number of articles in different journals and books.