Legal Transplant for Innovation and Creativity: A Sino-Finnish Comparative Study on the Governance of Intellectual Property Rights (TranSIP)

The project is a joint project between Hanken, the University of Helsinki, Institute of Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Shenzhen University in China. It is co-funded by the Academy of Finland and the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

This is a comparative law research project based on collaborative research in China and Finland. It explores the interaction of the law and societal change through regulation of economic activities, as observed in the development of Chinese intellectual property (IP) laws. In particular, we explore the use of legal transplants. Chinese IP law is going through a transformation due to international conventions based on Anglo-European IP norms, providing a rich source of legal transplants, but these may create tension in the receiving legal system and may work differently than in the source country. Therefore this process needs to be critically analysed from the perspective of comparative law. The recent proposal to adopt a Nordic model of extended collective licensing (ECL) into Chinese copyright law is one good example. We study how ECL may be adopted, how it works and what – expected or unexpected – effects can be seen as a result of the transplantation. The project will explore laws and doctrines, but also local practices based on data collected locally. Mainly due to the language barrier such studies are extremely rare. Our research team, which includes Chinese researchers trained in Europe aim to overcome it and integrate the findings of the research thoroughly with on-going debates both in China and in Europe.