Prof. Dr. Karl-Nikolaus Peifer

Professor Karl-Nikolaus Peifer is the Director of the Institute for Media Law and Communications Law of the University of Cologne/Germany. He studied law, economics and languages at the Universities of Trier, Bonn, Hamburg and Kiel. He held positions as a researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property Law in Munich, as an Assistant Professor in Kiel, and as a Professor of Private, Business, Media and Intellectual Property Law in Frankfurt/Oder and Bochum. In 2003 he was appointed to be a judge, first at the Court of Appeals in Hamm/Germany then (2013) at the Court of Appeals in Cologne/Germany. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois (teaching European Intellectual Property Law), the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Tiflis/Georgia and the University of Haifa/Israel. He was a research fellow at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1998), worked with the Law Firm Shearman & Sterling in New York (1991) and the German American Chamber of Commerce in Houston (1992). His main fields of research are Private, Intellectual Property and Media Law including information privacy law.