Caterina Sganga

Caterina Sganga is Director of the DIRPOLIS Institute (Law, Politics and Development) at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and Full Professor of Comparative Private Law. She joined Sant’Anna as an Associate Professor in October 2018. Prior to that, she was Assistant and later Associate Professor of Law at the Department of Legal Studies and Department of Economics and Business of Central European University (CEU, 2012-2018). She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Private Law from Sant’Anna (2011), an LL.M. from Yale Law School (2009), and an LL.B. (2004) and J.D. (2006) from University of Pisa.

Caterina's key research area is international and comparative intellectual property law, with a focus on European copyright law, IP and new technologies (especially artificial intelligence and data science), the balance between IP and fundamental/human rights, and the law and economics of cultural and creative industries (CCIs). Her recent research works cover also the regulation of data ownership and governance, with a focus on non-personal data, and Open Science law and policies.

She served as President of the European Policy for Intellectual Property Association (EPIP) – the leading association of European IP scholars in the fields of law, economics and management - for the term 2024-2025, and has been member of its Board since 2022. In May 2021 she was also elected as the Italian member of the European Copyright Society (ECS), one of the most prestigious independent academic associations in the field of copyright. Alongside these roles, Caterina is also a fellow of the European Law Institute (ELI), and a member of ATRIP (the International Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property) and ALPS (Association for Law, Property and Society).

In the past years she held visiting teaching appointments at the Faculty of Law of KU Leuven, where she was Global Law Professor, and at Maynooth University (Ireland), Central European University and the Europa-Kolleg of the University of Hamburg. Caterina was also a Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and a visiting researcher at the Center for Intellectual Property Policy at McGill University (Montreal).

From January 2020, she was the coordinator of the H2020 project reCreating Europe ("Rethinking digital copyright law for a culturally diverse, accessible, creative Europe", 2020-2022), which studied the impact of EU digital copyright law on creativity, cultural diversity and access to knowledge through a multidisciplinary approach and a focus on five groups of stakeholders (individual authors and performers, creative industries, cultural institutions such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums, intermediaries, users). ReCreating Europe offered innovative contributions to assess the impact of current laws, developed reform proposals, and prepared and tested guidelines which has already inspired the self-regulatory efforts of different interest groups. Thanks to the quality of its research outputs (all available in open access here) and to its impact on the activities of EU policymakers and stakeholders, the European Research Agency nominated reCreating Europe as one of its “Success Stories” – a recognition attributed only to a handful of EU-funded projects every year.

Caterina is currently WP Leader in three Horizon Europe projects, OpenMusE, REBOOT and ANIMA MUNDI.

In OpenMusE (“An Open, Scalable Data-to-Policy Pipeline for European Music Ecosystems”,  2023-2025), Caterina and her team carry out research on the legal and economic framework for diversity in the EU music sector, producing the first comprehensive mapping of EU and national laws and policies regulating the matter, developing indicators to measure music diversity in repertoires, cross-border activities and a variety of traditional and online distribution channels, and advancing proposals of legislative reform.

In REBOOT (“Reviving, Boosting, Optimising and Transforming European Film Competitiveness”, 2023-2025), they map and assess legal, policy and contractual measures  regulating the film-making industry (chiefly IP, audiovisual/media law, digital platforms regulation, cultural policies, collecting societies’ licensing schemes) in the EU and all its Member States, with the aim to test their degree of harmonization across the EU and to evaluate gaps and enablers towards the creation of competitive and diverse European filmmaking industries.

In ANIMA MUNDI (“IP, Discoverability and Partnerships: Reviving the International Promotion of European Values Through European Animation Industry Ecosystem", 2025-2028), Caterina and her team perform a comparative legal mapping of legislative sources and public policy interventions impacting on the regulation of ownership, creation, remuneration, production and distribution of content in the animation industry, with particular attention to the impact of AI and new technologies. The aims are to assess the state of EU harmonisation; delineate the room left to private autonomy; and identify enablers, constraints and challenges offered and raised by regulatory sources towards the growth, competitiveness and diversity of EAIE, and the fair remuneration of all players involved. Caterina’s team also conducts an assessment of the regulatory obstacles to import-export and competitiveness of European animation content in key markets such as Japan, China and South Corea. Finally, they perform an empirical review of contractual practices and IP management strategies in the sector, with a focus on the pre-production, production, distribution and export phase, in order to unveil best practices and needs, and offer an up-to-date analysis of creators’ remuneration and on the impact of AI on human creative productions.

From September 2023 she is the coordinator of the PRIN project Copy-IT (“Italian copyright law after the most recent reforms: impact assessment, best practices and policy recommendations for a fairer and more efficient system”, 2023-2024), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, which builds on the results of reCreating Europe to carry out similar research activities with a focus on Italian copyright law and local stakeholders and policymakers.

Caterina is the author of two monographs, "Propertizing European Copyright. History, Challenges and Opportunities" (Edward Elgar, 2018) and "I beni in generale" in the Italian Commentario al Codice Civile P.Schlesinger (Giuffré Editore, 2015), and the co-editor of three books, “NFTs, Creativity and the Law – Within and Beyond Copyright” (Routledge 2024, with E.Bonadio); “A Research Agenda for EU Copyright Law (Edward Elgar 2025, with E.Bonadio); and “Flexibilities in Copyright Law” (Routledge, forthcoming 2025, with T.Synodinou). From 2025, she is co-editor with Thomas Margoni of the Edward Elgar series "Kritika: Essays on Intellectual Property".

Her works have been published in several edited books and top-ranked international journals such as the International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law, the European Intellectual Property Review (EIPR), the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and E-Commerce Law (JIPITEC), the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice, GRUR Int., ERA Forum, and a number of Italian law reviews. You can find most of her publications in open access on SSRN and ResearchGate, and sporadic tweets here.

Aside from her academic activities, Caterina is the proud mom of two children, a certified sommelier, and an attorney-at-law at the Italian State Bar and at the New York State Bar.