Finnish IP professors in Joensuu and Turku

2-3/2018 22.8.2018

In Finland, legal issues of intellectual and industrial property can be studied in many institutions and at many levels. Four institutions of higher education have a faculty of law: Universities of Helsinki, Turku, Lapland and Eastern Finland. In addition, law is often included in economic study programs like at Hanken and Aalto University.

Professor Katja Weckström Lindroos is professor of commercial law at UEF Law School, University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on emerging markets and development of intellectual property law. Weckström Lindroos’s research links to two themes that intersect with intellectual property law: internet law and food law. Her doctoral dissertation A Contextual Approach to Limits in EU Trademark Law (2011) sets the theoretical framework for regulating emerging markets.

Recently, her attention has focused on liability for internet service providers for trademark or copyright infringement in digital markets. She supervises doctoral students on themes intersecting international patent protection and employment law, liability in the sale of digital goods and consumer law, as well as, intellectual property infringement and criminal law. Her focus on food law relates to intellectual property in developing economies, geographical indications, certification marks, health claims, plant variety protection and food fraud. She supervises doctoral students in law on themes intersecting IPRs and trade, development of sustainable food entrepreneurship, food security and food fraud.

Tuomas Mylly is professor of commercial law at the University of Turku. He focuses on international and European IP and competition law in the knowledge society from a constitutional perspective. His current research themes investigate the effects of fundamental rights on European copyright law and, more broadly, on intellectual property law.

In addition to giving copyright holders the right to prohibit reproductions, transmissions and performances of the protected works, European copyright law now regulates issues such as linking to content in the internet, blocking internet sites and providing open WiFi networks, among others. The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has addressed these and other important questions related to copyright and fundamental rights in its recent case law. Moreover, the CJEU has resorted to fundamental rights proportionality for example in its case law on standard-essential patents (Huawei). Mylly discusses this significant development and how the CJEU has used fundamental rights in its judgments, in particular.

He is the principal investigator in an Academy of Finland funded research project “Constitutional Hedges of Intellectual Property”. His future research also involves questions related to algorithmic decision-making in the areas of intellectual property and competition law. This research will also utilise constitutional perspectives.

The academic year 2017–2018 Mylly spent in Oxford, being attached to the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre and Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. He has recently published for example about the unitary patent system, discourse analytical view on CJEU’s copyright case law and book chapters on competition law in the information society, constitutional functions of the EU’s intellectual property treaties, human rights perspective on the CJEU’s IP case law.

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