
Professoressa Associata
Istituto di Diritto, Politica e Sviluppo
Caterina Sganga
Bio
Caterina Sganga joined Sant’Anna as an Associate Professor of Comparative Private Law in October 2018. Prior to her appointment at SSSA, 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, an LL.M. from Yale Law School, and an LL.B. and J.D. 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 (esp. AI and data science), the balance between IP and human rights, and data ownership and management in the era of big data. She also works on the IP-innovation interface, looking at the interplay between exclusivity, incentive and access in the cultural and creative industries and in the pharmaceutical market.
She is a member elected of the European Copyright Society (ECS), one of the most prestigious independent academic associations in the field of copyright, a fellow of the European Law Institute (ELI), and a member of several international IP and property law associations (EPIP, ATRIP, ALPS).
From January 2020, she is the coordinator of the H2020 project reCreating Europe ("Rethinking digital copyright law for a culturally diverse, accessible, creative Europe", 2020-2022), which studies 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 aims at offering innovative contributions to assess the impact of current laws, develop reform proposals, and prepare and test guidelines which may inspire the self-regulatory efforts of different interest groups.
In the past years she held visiting teaching appointments at Maynooth University (Ireland), CEU, the Europa-Kolleg of the University of Hamburg and the University of Pisa, was 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).
Caterina's book "Propertizing European Copyright. History, Challenges and Opportunities" has been published by Edward Elgar in 2018 (electronic version with Introduction and Chapter One in open access available here). She authored the volume "I beni in generale" (On goods - general theory) in the Italian Commentario al Codice Civile P.Schlesinger (Giuffré Editore) in 2015, and several contributions published in edited books, 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.
Caterina is also avvocato at the Italian State Bar and attorney-at-law at the New York State Bar.
Qualification
![]() |
Ph.D. in Law, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (2011) |
LL.M., Yale Law School (2009) | |
J.D. (2006), LL.B. (2004), University of Pisa | |
![]() |
Master’s Diploma in Law (2006), Diploma in Law (2004), Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna |
Ricerca
- Proprietà intellettuale internazionale e comparata, con particolare enfasi su
- Diritto d'autore UE
- Proprietà intellettuale e nuove tecnologie
- Proprietà intellettuale, diritti umani e costituzioni
- Proprietà intellettuale ed innovazione (industrie culturali e creative, settore farmaceutico)
- Proprietarizzazione e proprietà dei dati nell'era dei big data
- Diritto comparato della proprietà
- Diritto comparato della responsabilità civile, con particolare enfasi sul danno alla persona
Pubblicazioni
Corsi
Corsi integrativi per gli Allievi Ordinari
- La proprietà intellettuale tra esclusiva ed accesso (1 cr)
- Introduzione comparata alla proprietà intellettuale (2 cr)
- Diritto comparato della proprietà (2 cr)
- Common law contracts (1 cr)
- Diritto comparato del trust (1 cr)
- Economia e diritto dei brevetti (2 cr, in co-docenza con la Prof Arianna Martinelli)
- Economia e diritto della proprietà intellettuale (2 cr, in co-docenza con la Prof Arianna Martinelli)
PhD courses
- Intellectual Property and Human Rights (2 cr)
- Towards a Global Property Model? (1 cr)
- Digital Rights and Conflicts (2 cr)
- Frontiers of Intellectual Property: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Beyond (1 cr)
- Comparative Law of the Digital Economy (2 cr)
- Intellectual Property In and For Research (1 cr)
Conferenze ⇒ vedi curriculum vitae