Copyright
In 2010 I defended my doctoral thesis about conceptions of authorship and creativity in Swedish Copyright law 1810-1960. Since then, I have worked extensively with the history of copyright in a Swedish, Nordic and international context.
Between 2021 and 2025, I led the project Protection of Classics: Collective Rights, Cultural Heritage and Copyright. This study examined how the protection of classics – a specific provision in the Swedish Copyright Act designed to protect older literary or artistic works from being distorted – challenges established notions of the role and function of copyright and interacts with national and international discourses on cultural heritage, cultural policy and collective rights. The project was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
My current work focuses on the history of Nordic copyright law, examining how the development of Nordic copyright legislation is intertwined with the emergence of a pan-Scandinavian, and later Nordic, movement promoting Nordic cooperation, including in the fields of culture and law.
Partly in connection with this, I am also working on the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright, which presents primary sources on copyright alongside shorter essays providing historical context and analysis. I am the editor of the Scandinavian section, which documents the history of copyright in the Nordic countries.
Patents and Plant Variety Protection
Between 2018 and 2022, I worked on the project PASSIM: Patents as Scientific Information 1895–2020, funded by the European Research Council and led by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, where I studied how digital databases can be used to prevent the illegitimate patenting of traditional knowledge, with a particular focus on India.
As part of the project RESUS: Revitalisation and Sustainability, which I ran together with Johanna Dahlin, with funding from FORMAS, I have also studied issues relating to patents and plant breeders’ rights in agriculture and the right to freely share seed from a sustainability perspective.
Commons
Between 2015 and 2018, I conducted a major project, Commons and Commodities, which analyses the conflicts that arise when shared resources – the commons – are converted into private property, with a particular focus on cultural commons, traditional knowledge and mining. The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council and the EU’s Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions, and was partly carried out at the Institute of Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Piracy
As part of the postdoctoral project Globalisation of Copyright and the Ideology of Piracy (2011–2015), I studied the political mobilisation that took place around issues of copyright, filesharing and media piracy in the early 2000s. The study involved extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with members of the Pirate Party in various parts of the world. The project was carried out partly during a visiting research fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston and was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
