Miscellaneous matters

"Metaphors, law and digital phenomena: the Swedish pirate bay court case" is the title of a piece by Stefan Larsson PhD, LLM, aresearcher in Sociology of Law, Lund University, Sweden.  It's published in one of JIPLP's sister journals, the International Journal of Law and Information Technology (IJLIT), which you can learn all about here. According to the abstract:

"This article uses conceptual metaphor theory to develop the concept of ‘skeumorphs’ (reuse of old concepts for new phenomena) in order to analyse the Swedish The Pirate Bay court case. In line with conceptual metaphor theory, which states that abstract thinking is largely metaphorical, the article argues that this is true also for digital phenomena that, thus, are largely understood through metaphors and skeumorphs. Also, when attempting to understand and conceptualize new digital phenomena such as The Pirate Bay (TPB), law in a digital society is inevitably affected. Hence, new phenomena can be fought over in a ‘battle of metaphors’, in the TPB court case, for example, evidenced by the arguments of seeing TPB as ‘a platform’, ‘bulletin board’, or an ‘impure search engine’. This, here argued, was of key relevance for the outcome of the case".

Readers will appreciate that this is an imaginatively academic approach to the Swedish Pirate Bay litigation.  JIPLP itself welcomes more practical pieces in the happy knowledge that anyone who wants to write or read about skeumorphs has only to turn to IJLIT in order to do so.

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Here's a little reminder about submitting pieces for publication:

• * If you've not yet seen a copy of JIPLP, ask to inspect a sample issue so you can see what the articles and current intelligence notes look like before you do so.  If you wouldn't turn up at a party or an important meeting without checking what you should be wearing, so why should you think of submitting an article for publication without troubling to see what it should look like?
  
  
• * It's always best to check with JIPLP before writing a piece, in case we have already accepted an article on the same subject. You can easily do so by emailing our Commissioning Editor, Sarah Harris, at sarah.harris@oup.com and asking her.
  
  
• * Like many other journals, JIPLP has been using an online submission called Manuscript Central and has done so for some years. Please use it! If you submit anything for publication by emailing it to any member of the JIPLP team, this will only slow the publication process down since whoever receives your email and attachment will have to email you back to ask you to submit it online. Manuscript Central is not there to vex, annoy and inconvenience authors -- it is actually there for their benefit and protection, since it ensures that no article is ever "lost in the system" and that all  members of the editorial and production team can gain access to it with equal facility.

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Here's another reminder: JIPLP has a highly productive relationship with leading German IP periodical GRUR Int., which you can read all about here.  One of the benefits for JIPLP contributors is that, each month, two pieces from JIPLP (usually one article and one current intelligence note) are selected for publication in GRUR Int. too, thus giving the author a large and well-informed readership beyond that of JIPLP itself.