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

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. Rob Reid, TED talks The $8 Billion iPod [52]. See also the explanatory blog post Reid, The numbers behind the copyright math, http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/20/the-numbers-behind-the-copyright-math/ (last visited 14 August 2012).

  2. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association_of_America (last visited 14 August 2012).

  3. The other two reasons stated for reducing the number of downloads specified by the company by 50 %—in addition to possible unreliability of the counter on The Pirate Bay’s website—are that the calculation was intended for a type of right of disposition under copyright law other than the illegal file sharing that the case against The Pirate Bay involved in Sweden. The figures could also have been independent of geography.

  4. Considering that my goal has been to show the kinds of amounts that may be arrived at by using the price per copy approach in connection with file sharing statistics—i.e., not calculating on the basis of Swedish file sharing per se or whether the judicial analogy from illegal file sharing to other right of disposition under copyright law actually works—it would have made just as much sense to skip the 50 % reduction that the District Court applied to the number of downloads in the case against The Pirate Bay. Another significant difference is that the plaintiffs in the case against The Pirate Bay specified a figure based on a simple counter, whereas I have allowed the site owners themselves to provide the statistics.

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  1. Cybernorms Research Group, Department of Sociology of Law, Lund University, Box 42, 221 00, Lund, Sweden

    Stefan Larsson

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Larsson, S. Copy Me Happy: The Metaphoric Expansion of Copyright in a Digital Society. Int J Semiot Law 26, 615–634 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-012-9297-2

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