The aim of this paper is to analyse the legal record on civil litigation from mid-March 2020 to mid-July 2021 and examine COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments in a sample of litigated cases heard in Polish courts, more precisely 41 cases. In an attempt to establish the number and types of court cases in which such arguments have been raised, the population of individual case records was accessed electronically from the Ordinary Courts Judgments Portal. The analysed research material consists of texts of (...) written justifications published along with rulings of courts of the first instance in the Portal, except for texts regarding criminal cases and widely understood labour cases. This paper refers to certain theoretical aspects of argument and argumentation. Then, it sheds light on the use of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments by the parties involved in litigation—as reported by the courts in written justifications—considering, amongst others, whether those arguments were found convincing by the courts. Based on a survey of relevant cases, an attempt was made to identify categories of COVID-19 pandemic-related arguments of the parties involved in litigation, raised in their legal submissions. Also a look into the tendencies in this regard was taken to see whether any patterns emerge and it is possible to discern different trends in the analysed phenomena. The point of the analysis in this article is both descriptive and normative. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Recent studies of conceptual metaphors in a legal context have often dealt with the power of embodiment. However, the connotations of culturally originated metaphors could be different when they appear in laws and regulations. In particular, the role of metaphor when the legislator wishes to define intention in hybrid organizations is investigated here. The case studied is how a conceptual metaphor of ‘business’ manifesting itself in the Swedish simile adjective affärsmässig has spread over 40 years. ‘Business’ early on acquired connotations (...) such as impartiality and methodical approach, and can be used metaphorically. Introduced in the regulation of public procurement, ‘businesslike’ was later used to regulate conflicts of interest, restrict state aid and also entered tax legislation. Analysis of Swedish court decisions where ‘businesslike’ occurs shows how the emphasis has shifted from public sector efficiency to neo-liberal principles of competition, while stronger social norms related to environmental effects have led to the term being removed from the Public Procurement Act. Elements of a mixed jurisdiction arise from reliance on EU case-law, and national use of ambiguous cultural metaphors in legal texts and court decisions is a plausible response. (shrink)