Professor Eirini Stamatoudi

Law

Irini Stamatoudi is a Professor and the Director of the School of Law at UNIC Athens. She is also a lawyer at the Supreme Court in Greece. She holds degrees from the Capodistrian University of Athens (LLB) and the University of Leicester (UK) (LL.M. in European and International Trade Law and Ph.D.).

From 2007 to 2018, she served as the General Director of the Greek National Copyright Office (Greek Ministry of Culture and Sports). She led the Greek Presidency of the Council of the European Union on Copyright in 2014 and was elected Vice President at the 14th session of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee of the Universal Copyright Convention.

She has taught at the Law School of the University of Leicester, on the joint LL.M. of the University of Turin, ILO, and WIPO, at the International Hellenic University, at the Academy of the World Intellectual Property Organization, and in several other academic courses worldwide.

She has worked as a copyright expert on projects in Georgia, Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Egypt, Azerbaijan, and other locations.

She has authored 4 monographs, edited 13 books, and published approx. 150 chapters and articles in Greece, Cyprus, the UK, the US, etc. Some of her writings are considered internationally works of reference (e.g., I. Stamatoudi, Multimedia products as copyright works, Cambridge University Press, 2002, (reprint in paperback in January 2008, Kindle Edition 2010); I. Stamatoudi, Cultural Property Law and Restitution. A Commentary to International Conventions and European Union Law, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham (UK) – Northampton (US), 2011, I. Stamatoudi and P. Torremans (eds), European Union Copyright Law. A Commentary, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014, and 2021 (2nd ed.). P. Torremans, I. Stamatoudi, P. K. Yu, and B. J. Jütte (eds), Elgar Encyclopedia of Intellectual Property Law, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026).

She co-authored the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Academy DL specialization course on copyright and has taught WIPO distance-learning courses since their inception in 2001.

She researches copyright, AI and copyright, Intellectual Property Management, Cultural Heritage Management, and cultural heritage law. In addition to writing articles, she has done hands-on work in the field. For many years, she served as a legal counselor to the Ministry of Culture on issues of illegal trafficking of antiquities, where she handled the famous return cases of masterpieces from the J. P. Getty Museum (Los Angeles) and the Leon Levy & Shelby White collection (NY). Since 1999, she has served on several negotiation committees regarding the Parthenon Marbles and currently serves on the Ministry of Culture Advisory Committee on the Parthenon Marbles. She has also participated in law-drafting committees and worked as a lawyer at firms on IP and IP management.

The most recent research project in Cultural Heritage Management is RenIherit (an EU 2020 Horizon Project), which concluded in 2014 <https://www.reinherit.eu/>.

She is included in the WIPO List of Arbitrators and Mediators, the UNESCO List of Mediators and Conciliators, and the ICOM-WIPO List of Mediators.

She is also the Vice President of Blue Shield Greece.