Dr. Kacper Szkalej

Dr Kacper Szkalej is a researcher in intellectual property law at IViR. His academic expertise centres on protection and exploitation of information. Concentrating his activity primarily on copyright law, Kacper’s research ethos and interests are marked by a cross-disciplinary approach spanning the realm of law, technological regulation and contractual practices within the digital market, and cover a wide array of themes such as protection and consumer access to content, remuneration schemes, public interest exploitation, platform regulation, automation of decision-making, machine learning workflows and generative AI, open access, copyright enforcement and human rights.

Before joining IViR, Kacper was Assistant Professor in Law and Technology at the Swedish Law and Informatics Research Institute (IRI) at Stockholm University and the cross-disciplinary research center Digital Futures, where he worked with intellectual property, information security, and data protection law. He also served as Assistant Professor in Private Law at the Centre for Business Law (ACLU) at Lund University between 2021-2022 and prior to that was Doctoral Researcher and Lecturer in intellectual property law at the Institute of Intellectual Property, Marketing, and Competition Law (IMK) at Uppsala University between 2013-2021. In 2022 Kacper was awarded the von Bahr’s Prize by Uppsala University for best doctorate in private law for his work Copyright in the Age of Access to Legal Digital Content (2021) that comprehensively investigates copyright protection from a user perspective, regulation by technology and contractual practices in content distribution channels, as well as copyright’s interface with human rights and consumer protection law. The work underscores in particular the overriding and unpredictable nature of the use of technology and argues for the adoption of an access rhetoric to regulating consumer exploitation of protected content as a mode to ensure reliable and predictable forms of content acquisition.

With an extensive research and teaching portfolio, Kacper is regularly engaged as speaker at academic and non-academic fora and as guest lecturer in technology law at law schools throughout Sweden as well as technical schools such as the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH) or Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University. In addition, he often acts as national expert for Sweden in international comparative law projects, for instance SIENNA, Global Online Piracy Study, or Recreating Europe, and has acted as copyright expert in several formal public consultation proceedings. He is co-author of the accessible title on EU copyright law EU Copyright Law: Subsistence, Exploitation and Protection of Rights (2019, Kluwer Law International) and co-editor of the international comparative title Employees’ Intellectual Property Rights (2015 and 2018, Kluwer Law International). Since 2023 Kacper acts as Scientific Board Member at Copyright Flexibilities and since 2022 as Board Member of AIPPI Sweden.