Digital Piracy of MP3s: Consumer and Ethical Predispositions

Purpose – Illegal downloading of music has become an inexorable and rampant activity particularly among college students who have been little deterred by industry legal actions. The purpose of this research is to examine the present state of downloading and how ethical orientation and attitudes towards MP3 piracy impact such activities. The paper also aims to use ethical scenarios as a way of understanding the ethical reasoning in illegal downloading. Design/methodology/approach – Key research questions are proposed that are related to illegal downloading. A sample of 364 university students was used to examine each research question. Statistical results are reported. Findings – The results clearly show that downloading continues at a high rate today driven by a strong belief that it is not ethically wrong. Ethical orientation was found to be positively associated with awareness of the social cost of downloading, consequences of downloading, and ethical belief in downloading. Ethical scenarios show that ethical orientation is also associated with downloading activities and with stealing. Other results indicate that respondents believe that their peers are more prone to stealing music and downloading MP3s illegally. Fear of consequences does seem to have an impact on the propensity to download illegally. Practical implications – The paper contributes to inform industry representatives that appeals to ethics or guilt are not likely to deter illegal downloading measurably. The use of punishment for downloaders may have a short-term effect but other (more positive) measures are required. Originality/value – No research has examined downloading of MP3s in the manner developed in this paper. The paper contributes to a better understanding of consumer behavior among those who download. The results provide insight into a serious problem in the recording industry that is likely to persist in the distant future unless sound measures are developed

Leech: BitTorrent and Music Piracy Sonification

This paper provides an overview of a multi-media composition, Leech, which aurally and visually renders BitTor- rent traffic. The nature and usage of BitTorrent networking is discussed, including the implications of widespread music piracy. The traditional usage of borrowed musical material as a compositional resource is discussed and expanded upon by including the actual procurement of the musical material as part of the performance of the piece. The technology and tools required to produce this work, and the roles that they serve, are presented. Eight distinct streams of data are targeted for visualization and sonification: Torrent progress, download/upload rate, file name/size, number of peers, peer download progress, peer location, packet transfer detection, and the music being pirated. An overview of the methods used for sonifying and and visualizing this data in an artistic manner is presented

Musical Property Rights Regimes in Tanzania and Kenya after TRIPS

Despite the passage of relatively uniform copyright legislation throughout East Africa and the formation of regional organizations meant to further standardize these laws, the protection of musical works in East African creative industries has varied significantly within and between Tanzania and Kenya. While enforcement remains weak throughout East Africa, each country has also taken a different path in the implementation of copyright policies meant to support musical property rights. These different trajectories can be explained, in large part, by the particular political, social and economic paths taken by East African countries toward the neoliberal present

The Apple E-Book Agreement and Ruinous Competition: Are E-Goods Different for Antitrust Purposes?

Publishers have spent the last decade and a half struggling against falling prices for digital goods. The recent antitrust case against Apple and the major publishers highlights collusive price fixing as a potential method for resisting depreciation. This Article examines the myriad ways in which digital distribution puts downward pressure on prices, and seeks to determine whether or not collusive price fixing would serve as an appropriate response to such pressure given the goals of the copyright grant. Considering retailer bargaining power, increased access to substitutes, the loss of traditional price discrimination methods, the effects of vertical integration in digital publishing, and the increasing competitiveness of the public domain, I conclude that the resultant downward price pressure might in fact significantly hamper the commodity distribution of digital goods. I remain unconvinced, however, that price fixing is an appropriate solution. The copyright grant affords rights holders commercial opportunities beyond simple commodity distribution. These other methods for commercializing e-goods suggest to me that current pricing trends are not indicative of market failure, but rather of a changing marketplace

The Role of Morality in Digital Piracy: Understanding the Deterrent and Motivational Effects of Moral Reasoning in Different Piracy Contexts

Digital piracy has been a chronic issue in intellectual property protection. With the prevalence of online technologies, digital piracy has become even more rampant, as digital resources can now be accessed and disseminated easily through the Internet. While the antecedents of piracy behaviors have been studied for years, previous studies often focus on a specific type of behavior or pirated content and the findings are far from conclusive. They do not paint a coherent picture of the impacts of antecedents. In this study, we focus on the role of morality by revealing the different levels of moral reasoning that can both deter and motivate users’ piracy intentions. Furthermore, we differentiate between two types of piracy behaviors (unauthorized copying/downloading vs. unauthorized sharing) and two categories of digital products (application software vs. music/movies), so that the differential impacts of the various antecedents can be assessed and articulated more clearly. We empirically evaluated the models in the four piracy contexts using a sample of 3,426 survey participants from a sizable IT-literate society. Our findings indicate the conflicting roles of morality in piracy intention and demonstrate its differential impacts across the two types of piracy behaviors, which can be generalized across the two categories of digital products. Our study sheds new light on end users’ considerations in accessing and disseminating unauthorized digital content. It also informs the design of copyright protection policies and sanction measures with different levels of specificity

The economics of copyright law: a stocktake of the literature

This article is a survey of publications by economists writing on copyright law. It begins with a general overview of how economists analyse these questions; the distinction is made between the economics of copying and the economic aspects of copyright law as analysed in law and economics. It then continues with sections on research on the effects of copying and downloading and the effects of unauthorised use (‘piracy’) and ends with an overall evaluation of the economics of copyright in the light of recent technological changes. Economists have always been, and still are, somewhat sceptical about copyright and question what alternatives there are to it. On balance, most accept the role of copyright law in the creative industries while urging caution about its becoming too strong. And although European authors’ rights are different in legal terms from the Anglo-American copyright, the economic analysis of these laws is essentially the same

Moving from Data-Constrained to Data-Enabled Research: Experiences and Challenges in Collecting, Validating and Analyzing Large-Scale e-Commerce Data

Widespread e-commerce activity on the Internet has led to new opportunities to collect vast amounts of micro-level market and nonmarket data. In this paper we share our experiences in collecting, validating, storing and analyzing large Internet-based data sets in the area of online auctions, music file sharing and online retailer pricing. We demonstrate how such data can advance knowledge by facilitating sharper and more extensive tests of existing theories and by offering observational underpinnings for the development of new theories. Just as experimental economics pushed the frontiers of economic thought by enabling the testing of numerous theories of economic behavior in the environment of a controlled laboratory, we believe that observing, often over extended periods of time, real-world agents participating in market and nonmarket activity on the Internet can lead us to develop and test a variety of new theories. Internet data gathering is not controlled experimentation. We cannot randomly assign participants to treatments or determine event orderings. Internet data gathering does offer potentially large data sets with repeated observation of individual choices and action. In addition, the automated data collection holds promise for greatly reduced cost per observation. Our methods rely on technological advances in automated data collection agents. Significant challenges remain in developing appropriate sampling techniques integrating data from heterogeneous sources in a variety of formats, constructing generalizable processes and understanding legal constraints. Despite these challenges, the early evidence from those who have harvested and analyzed large amounts of e-commerce data points toward a significant leap in our ability to understand the functioning of electronic commerce.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000231 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Effects of Pirated Music on Individual Musicians

What kind of effect does pirated music have on musicians? Illegal music file sharing has become a huge problem over the last 15 years for the music industry. While it claims to have lost billions of dollars because of the problem, it is unclear what kind of effects piracy has on an individual musician