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Copy Me Happy: The Metaphoric Expansion of Copyright in a Digital Society

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Author

Summary, in English

The article uses conceptual metaphor theory in order to analyse how the concept of “copy” in copyright law is expanding in a digital society to cover more phenomena than it originally did. For this purpose, the legally accepted model for valuing media files in the case against The Pirate Bay (TPB) is used in the analysis. When four men behind TPB was convicted in District Court of Stockholm, Sweden, on 17 April 2009, it to many marked a victory for the American and Swedish media corporations over online piracy. The convicted men were jointly liable for the damages on roughly EUR 3.5 million. But how do you calculate damages of file sharing? For example, what is the value of a copy? The article uses a model of valuing files in monetary numbers, suggested by the American plaintiffs and sanctioned by the District Court in the case against the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay (TPB), in order to calculate the total value of an entire and in this anonymous other BitTorrent site. These calculated hypothetical figures are huge – EUR 53 billion – and grow click by click, which on its hand questions some of the key assumptions in the copy-by-copy valuation that are sprung from analogue conceptions of reality, and transferred into a digital context. This signals a (legal) conceptual expansion of the meaning of “copy” in copyright that does not seem to fit with how the phenomenon is conceptualised by the younger generation of media consumers.

Department/s

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Pages

615-634

Publication/Series

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volume

26

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Information Systems, Social aspects
  • Law and Society

Keywords

  • Copy
  • Copyright
  • Metaphor
  • Conceptions
  • Pirate Bay
  • Legal conceptual change.

Status

Published

Research group

  • Cybernorms

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0952-8059