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

摘要

The article uses conceptual metaphor theory to analyse how the concept of “copy” in copyright law is expanding in a digital society to cover more phenomena than originally intended. 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 were convicted in the District Court of Stockholm, Sweden, on 17 April 2009, to many, it marked a victory over online piracy for the American and Swedish media corporations. The convicted men were jointly liable for the damages of 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 for valuating files in monetary numbers, suggested by the American plaintiffs and sanctioned by the District Court in the case against the BitTorrent site 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 face, 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.