Alina Trapova

Assistant Professor in Law and Autonomous Systems, University of Nottingham
Alina Trapova is an Assistant Professor in Law and Autonomous Systems at The University of Nottingham.

Alina holds a PhD in Legal Studies (cum laude) from Bocconi University, as well as an LLM in Intellectual Property Law from Queen Mary University of London and an LLB from The University of Sheffield.

Before joining academia, Alina has worked at the European Union Intellectual Property Office in Alicante (Spain) as part of the Pan-European Seal Programme, which she completed with merit. There she worked as a Legal Assistant to the President of the Boards of Appeal, drafted appeal decisions on trade mark and design matters and assisted litigators of the Office when defending cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union.

Alina then spent some time in private practice, after which she moved to academia. She started her PhD in Legal Studies (International and European Law) at Bocconi University in Milan (Italy) in 2017, where she was granted a full merit-based scholarship. Alina's PhD thesis, entitled 'EU Copyright Law and Machine Learning: A Net of Authorship Claims', was awarded cum laude at her defence in 2021. For it, Alina spent time at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich.

Alina has also collaborated with fashion institutes in Milan (Milano Fashion Institute and Accademia del Lusso). She has also acted as an external expert and a rapporteur for the European Union Intellectual Property Office (on a project related to the harmonisation of the procedural aspects at EU appeal bodies within the EU decentralised agencies), the European Audiovisual Observatory (on a project related to online piracy of sports events), as well as the Ukrainian government (on a comparative study on the establishment of a specialised Ukrainian IP Court in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London).

Alina's research interests focus on the implications of machine learning and artificial intelligence on the law and our society more broadly speaking. While her starting point is intellectual property, Alina is keen to explore the implications of autonomous systems beyond this field and looks also at the consequences for competition law, consumer law and anti-discrimination law.

Alina's current research interests focus on robo-journalism. She is researching the impact of robo-journalism on human journalists' creativity from the perspective of copyright law. Alina is also keen to explore the editorial practices and the technology employed in robo-newsroom.

Additionally, Alina has a keen interest for EU law. She is keen on exploring the limits of the EU's law-making powers in the field of copyright law. Looking at the internal market objective, she is analysing the room for legislative initiative in the field of works generated by artificial intelligence and copyright law.