Born in 1974, Stefan Bechtold graduated from the University of Tübingen Law School, Germany, in 1999. From 1997 to 2004, he was a research assistant to Professor Wernhard Möschel at the University of Tübingen Law School.
In 1999 and 2000, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. In 2001, he received a Dr. iur. (legal Ph.D.) from the University of Tübingen Law School. Supported by a Fulbright scholarship, he received a master's degree (J.S.M.) from Stanford Law School in 2002. Since 2002, he is a non-residential Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. From 2002 to 2004, he was a law clerk ("Referendar") at the regional court ("Landgericht") of Tübingen, which is a mandatory part of German legal education. As part of this training, he spent a three-month internship at a telecommunications law unit of the European Commission's Directorate General Information Society in summer 2004. In 2004, he was appointed to the expert committee on copyright and publishing law of the
"Deutsche Vereinigung für gewerblichen Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht e.V. (GRUR)" (German professional association for intellectual property law). Since January 2005, he is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany. At the Max Planck Institute, he is writing his "Habilitation" (post-doctoral thesis) which is supervised by Professor Wernhard Möschel from the University of Tübingen Law School. In the fall of 2005, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam.
Mr. Bechtold is the author of numerous publications (in German and English) in the area of cyberlaw and intellectual property, including a book on the implications of digital rights management. He is a regular speaker at conferences on cyberlaw and intellectual property. From 1997 to 2004, he maintained the Link Controversy Page, a web page on legal questions of hyperlinks, frames and inline images. Mr. Bechtold's scholarly interests include the intertwining of law, technology and economics in the information society, in particular regarding various forms of intellectual property. In addition, Mr. Bechtold has composed numerous orchestra and chamber music works which have been awarded several composition prizes and have been repeatedly performed and broadcast.