Welcome back to Beyond the Patterns.

So today I have the great pleasure to announce Professor Dr. Jochen Hofmann.

So he is a professor in law and business at the University of Allang Nürnberg, so our

university and prior to that he studied law and business at the University of Bayreuth

where he passed the first state examination in law in 1995 and received his doctorate

in 1998.

After passing the second state examination in law in 1998, he worked as a research assistant

at the University of Bayreuth from 1999 to 2006.

He received his habillitation there in 2005.

From 2006 to 2009 he was professor for civil law, business law and international economic

law at the University of Hamburg.

Since October 1st 2009 Professor Hofmann holds the chair for business law at the Friedrich

Alexander University Allang Nürnberg and has been dean of the faculty of business,

economics and law and the speaker of the School of Law since 2020.

So it's a great pleasure to have him here as guest.

You will see that we also have topics from the different fields of science and in particular

today we want to look a bit into international competition law and in particular the European

competition law because this is also something where computer science, machine learning and

also forensics is very relevant in order to discover the relations between the different

market players and also to unveil potential miscommunication or hidden communication that

is actually not allowed.

So this is exactly the topic that we will be hearing about today and the presentation

is entitled information exchange as an infringement of competition law.

So I'm very much looking forward to this presentation and Jochen the stage is yours.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you for the invitation and hello everybody.

I hope that you can hear me well.

I just encountered some technical problems here understanding Andreas so if you can hear

me then maybe you can just interfere.

I want to talk about information exchange as an infringement of competition law as Andreas

has already said today.

Obviously that is a topic that is interesting because the exchange of information happens

all the time more or less but as you can, as I will demonstrate in a second, you have

to be careful when exchanging information with people that especially that are your

competitors.

Before I want to go into that specific topic I want to give you a very brief overview of

European competition law or what that is very brief only in a nutshell.

We have a number of rules on the European level against private infringement of competition

to protect the system of undistorted competition on the EU internal market.

So we have an internal market in the European Union and the basis of that market is the

free movement of goods and the free movement of services and capital and people and on

this market that is enabled by the free movement principles we took the basic decision that

it's a free market economy and in the free market economy is the basis of a free market

economy is a system of undistorted competition, a working competition you can also say so

we have to protect that from private parties acting against the mechanism of competition

and that's what these rules are for.

We have three basic elements of the European competition law that are widely known probably

to most of you, you probably just don't know what the underlying provision is.

The first provision that we are going to focus on here today is article one and one of the

treaty of the functioning of the European Union that is the acronym here TFEU.