News Update August 2025: New Board of Directors, DPMA Communications

Thomas Mielke | | Reply

New Board of Directors

Last month, the Board of Directors, which was newly elected at the Annual General Meeting in June, was constituted. It now consists of the following members:

Anja Goller
Christoph Scheid
Danny Bruder (Vice Chair)
Hartmut Hotzel
Konstantin Hondros
Meik Michalke
Stephan Fritzsche (Chair of the Board of Directors)
Stephan ‘Duke’ Erdmann

We would like to congratulate the new Board members on their election and wish them every success in getting C3S through the approval process quickly and continuing to prepare for the launch of the music collecting society.

DPMA Communication

Following the ambivalent response from the DPMA (the German patent and trademark office) in spring, which reached us with some delay, we had to take some time to respond. One hurdle that still stands in the way of approval is the following:

After we presented our two-stage solution for the election of the managing directors (“Plan B”), the DPMA continues to fundamentally dispute the admissibility of monistically managed companies becoming collecting societies under applicable law. The well-intentioned innovations of the 2016 Act on the Management of Copyright and Related Rights by Collecting Societies, which imposes a somewhat more democratic co-determination on established collecting societies, actually lead to irritation and incompatibilities in a monistically organized European cooperative such as C3S SCE (which is already based on democratic self-determination principles) if the law is interpreted literally. However, this interpretation is also disastrous in terms of competition in the EU. We have presented good arguments for an interpretation in line with the legislative intent. However, in order to avoid a protracted dispute, we have offered the DPMA an interim solution as “Plan C” until final clarification, whereby the managing directors are elected at the general meeting, which may be impractical for us, but is not legally controversial.

Unfortunately, there were also misunderstandings based on the fact that the DPMA had worked through an old version of the statutes without being asked to do so — we had deliberately not sent the current draft version last year in the hope that the response time be shorter. We clarified the issues raised in relation to membership admission and the scope of collecting society operations on the basis of the current draft statutes. However, there was also constructive criticism in this section, e.g., the justified suggestion to revise the preamble to the statutes. We regret the decision not to approve our business plan, which was updated earlier this year. In its letter, the DPMA stated that it had only carried out a “cursory review”; this does not rule out the possibility of further surprises before approval is granted.

We are continuing to seek dialogue with the DPMA and are aiming for a face-to-face meeting in this year’s fall in order to potentially speed up processes and promote mutual understanding, even though the DPMA has repeatedly refused to do so until it has fully reviewed the most recently submitted documents.

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