The Intellectual Property Group (Bechtold) at ETH Zurich is part of the Center for Law & Economics within the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich. The group investigates the design of intellectual property law, law & technology (Internet law, privacy law, automated decision-making, legal tech), and antitrust law. It engages in empirical & experimental research and applies machine-learning & natural-language processing tools to intellectual property law and beyond. The group explores how to regulate the digital economy at scale where regulators face thousands of content providers and millions of consumers. The group co-organizes the Workshop & Lecture Series on the Law & Economics of Innovation, which regularly brings leading internationally well-known experts from all over the world to Zurich.
Beat Weibel, Head of ETH transfer at ETH Zurich, has been appointed as "Professor of Practice" in the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS). Together with Prof. Stefan Bechtold from the CLE, he will develop and implement training and awareness initiatives for ETH students in the area of intellectual property.
On September 2, EPFL, ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) released Apertus, the first large-scale, open, multilingual language model. Prof. Elliott Ash, Jingwei Ni and Dr. Alexander Hoyle from the ETH Center for Law & Economics (CLE) are among the co-authors of Apertus.
Margaritha Windisch, Ph.D. candidate at ETH’s Center for Law & Economics (CLE), reached 2nd place in the Young Scholar Recognition at the European Society for Empirical Legal Studies (ESELS) Conference 2025 in Toulouse.
