Online piracy, anonymity and social change – Deviance through innovation (original) (raw)
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Online piracy, anonymity and social change: Innovation through deviance
… : The International Journal …, 2012
This article analyses current trends in the use of anonymity services among younger Swedes (15-25 years old) and focuses on individuals engaging in illegal file sharing in order to better understand the rationale behind both file sharing as well as online anonymity, especially in relation to enforcement of copyright. By comparing the findings of a survey conducted on three occasions (early 2009, late 2009 and early 2012), we measure the fluctuations in the use of anonymity services among approximately 1000 15-25-year-olds in Sweden, compare them with file sharing frequencies and, to some extent, trends within legal enforcement. The article also suggests that the key to understanding any relationship between copyright enforcement and fluctuations in online anonymity can be found in the law's relationship to social norms in terms of legitimacy by showing a correlation between file sharing frequency and the use of anonymity services. The findings indicate that larger proportions of frequent file sharers (downloaders) also use anonymity services more often than those who file share less. However, in comparison to the earlier surveys, the strongest increase in the use of anonymity services is found in the groups where file sharing is less frequent, suggesting that reasons for actively making oneself less traceable online other than avoiding copyright enforcement have emerged since the initial two surveys in 2009. Further, the overall increase (from 8.6 per cent to 14.9 per cent) in using anonymity services found for the whole group of respondents suggests both that high file sharing frequency is a driver for less traceability, as well as a larger trend for online anonymity relating to factors other than mere file sharing of copyright infringing content -for example, increased governmental identification, data retention and surveillance in the online environment. The results are analysed in Merton's terminology as file sharers and protocol architects adapting in terms of both innovation and rebellion in the sense that institutional means for achieving specific Downloaded from cultural goals are rejected. This means, to some extent, participating in or contributing to the construction of other means for reaching cultural goals.
Compliance or Obscurity? Online Anonymity as a Consequence of Fighting Illegal File Sharing
Policy & Internet: Vol. 2: Iss. 4, Article 4., 2010
The European Union directive on Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement (IPRED) was implemented in Sweden on April 1, 2009, and was meant to be the enforcement needed to achieve increased compliance with intellectual property online, especially copyright. This, therefore, was the manifest function of the directive. The article empirically shows changes in levels of use of Online Anonymity Services (OAS) as a result of the implementation of IPRED in Sweden, as being a latent dysfunction of the implementation The data consists of two surveys of about 1,000 people between 15 and 25 years of age, where the first survey was conducted two months prior to the implementation of IPRED, and the second one seven months afterwards. This data is complemented with OAS statistics as well as Google search engine statistics in Sweden during 2009 on a selection of phrases related to online anonymity, revealing the link between encrypted anonymity fluctuations and copyright enforcement. The article suggests that a key to understand any relationship between IPRED and fluctuations in online anonymity can be found in the law’s relationship to social norms and levels of perceived legitimacy. The implementation of illegitimate laws is likely to spur dysfunctional (for the law) counter-measures. In the case of copyright enforcement and encryption technologies, the first seems to drive the other to some extent, affecting the balance of openness and anonymity on the Internet, possibly and at worst leading to that the enforcement of legislation that has a weak representation among social norms negatively affects the enforcement of legislation that has a strong representation among social norms.
Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing: Special Issue on Digital Piracy, 2012
"Purpose The purpose of this study is to better understand online anonymity in the global file-sharing community in the context of social norms and copyright law. The study describes the respondents in terms of use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or similar services with respect to age, gender, geographical location, as well as analysing the correlation with file-sharing frequencies. Design/methodology/approach This study, to a large extent, collected descriptive data through a web-based survey. This was carried out in collaboration with the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (TPB), which allowed us to link the survey from the main logo of their site. In 72 hours, we received over 75,000 responses, providing the opportunity to compare use of anonymity services with factors of age, geographical region, file-sharing frequency, etc. Findings Overall, 17.8 per cent of the respondents used a VPN or similar service (free or paid). A core of high-frequency uploaders is more inclined to use VPNs or similar services than the average file sharer. Online anonymity practices in the file-sharing community depend on how legal and social norms correlate (more enforcement means more anonymity). Research limitations/implications The web-based survey was in English and mainly attracted visitors on The Pirate Bay’s web site. This means that it is likely that those who do not have the language skills necessary were excluded from the survey. Practical implications This study adds to the knowledge of online anonymity practices in terms of traceability and identification, and therefore describes some of the conditions for legal enforcement in a digital environment. Social implications This study adds to the knowledge of how the Internet is changing in terms of a polarization between stronger means of legally enforced identification and a growing awareness of how to be more untraceable. Originality/value The scale of the survey, with over 75,000 respondents from most parts of the world, has likely not been seen before on this topic. The descriptive study of anonymity practices in the global file-sharing community is therefore likely unique. "
Professionalization, Gender and Anonymity in the Global File Sharing Community
The Piracy Effect (online edition) - edited by Roberto Braga and Giovanni Caruso , 2013
This article presents the analysis of a large survey on file-sharing that was conducted in April 2011 with over 75,000 respondents from all over the world. The study, also known as The Research Bay, due to that it was conducted in collaboration with the infamous BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay, by the Cybernorms research group. The aim of the online study of The Pirate Bay community has been to describe a file sharing community from within and thereby to shed light on the underlying demographics and social structures of the phenomenon that has emerged as one of the greatest challenges to IP law ever. The results indicate that this community of mainly bitTorrentfile-sharers to a large extent is a male community (93.8 % of the respondents were male) of a younger generation (77.3 percent were younger than 30 years of age). These results, in combination with the fact that the relatively low share of uploaders are more inclined to seek protection from identification via encrypted means than the rest and the fact that offline sharing is common, is an indication of that the file sharing community is differentiated within. This is in the article discussed in terms of a professionalization or specialization existing in the file-sharing community, that includes different roles in an “eco system” of sharing files and consuming media. This means that those informants we have found via the Pirate Bay website may represent a link in a bigger chain, as a technology competent and vital link for a larger structure of which BitTorrent plays an important, but not all-encompassing, part.
Social Norms and Intellectual Property. Online Norms and the European Legal Development
Research Report in Sociology of Law 2009:1. Lund: MediaTryck., 2009
This report is the result of study that was performed in January and February 2009. It was presented and reviewed at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association: Law, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century in May 2009. The study empirically examined, or rather examined the lack of, social norms opposing illegal file sharing. A total of over 1,000 respondents have answered the questionnaire. Along with the social norm indicators, the study maps out relevant questions regarding internet behaviour in this field, such as the will to use anonymity services and the will to pay for copyrighted content. These results are compared and contrasted with the legal development trend in European law in internet and file sharing related matters, as well as the Swedish implementation of this development, as a member of the European Union. This includes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (IPRED), the Directive on Data retention as well as the implementation of INFOSOC. Svensson and Larsson in Social Norms and Intellectual Property – Online norms and the European legal development consequently portrays the social norms on the one hand and the legal development on the other, and the overarching question of the report therefore addresses the correlation of these two. Do the social norms amongst 15-25 year olds match the legal regulation, as well as the regulatory trend on this field? If not, how can this be understood or explained? The study shows that the cybernorms differ, both in inherent structures and origin, from current legal constructions.
Studying norms and social change in a digital age
In Baier, M. (ed.) Social and Legal Norms. London: Ashgate., 2013
Central to this paper is the gap between the social and legal norms within the field of copyright related behaviour in an online context. Many of the studies mentioned in this chapter have pointed out this gap and displayed the lack of social norms that correspond to those parts of copyright that deal with control over reproduction and distribution (e.g. Svensson and Larsson 2012). The overall and long-lasting consequences of the gap between social norms and copyright law are hard to predict but, by using a four-dimensional socio-legal model (the FDSL-model), they may be both highlighted and analysed in a meaningful way. By addressing the gaps between the different dimensions of socio-legal norms that are presented in the model, a greater understanding of the on-going gap-related processes could be achieved. A multidimensional gap problem The gap between the normative and the factual dimensions of social norms relates to the difference in societal norms concerning file-sharing and the actual intergroup norms within groups involved in file-sharing. While the factual dimensions are measureable through the use of quantitative studies, the normative dimension of social norms needs to be penetrated and explored with a more qualitative approach. The social norms related to file-sharing are somewhat consistent; the findings in Study 2 (interviews with young Swedes) confirm that social pressure and norms measured in Study 3 are not strong enough to dissuade young people from illegal file-sharing activities. However, the findings in Study 2 suggest that this is mainly due to an internalized pattern of behaviour wherein file-sharing tends to be handled as unproblematic. The legal status of file-sharing of copyright protected material overall is a non-issue to the respondents of the focus group interviews of Study 2. This suggests that the findings in Study 3 related to Social Norm Strength have a real impact on young file-sharers; but also, that this lack of norm pressure concerning these issues means that it is generally of little interest to even relate to the legal grounds of file-sharing. This may also be understood by the findings in both Study 2 as well as the descriptive Study 1 (global file-sharing community), regarding the different methods to acquire file-shared material. This suggests that the file-sharing methods are not a key factor, but rather a sign of an on-going professionalization or specialization, including different roles in the `eco system´ of sharing files, further supported by Svensson, Larsson and de Kaminski (2013b; 2013a) and Larsson et al., (2012). This means that those informants we have found via the Pirate Bay website may represent a link in a bigger chain, as a technologically competent and vital link for a bigger ecosystem of file-sharing. This professionalization hints at a larger, structured organization within the file-sharing community, of which BitTorrent plays an important, but not all-encompassing, role. It is not a result of a planned form of organization; nonetheless, it constitutes a structure for content dissemination, where gender plays a significant role (Svensson, Larsson, and de Kaminski 2013a; 2013b). This is supported in the focus group interviews in Study 2, where respondents not feeling competent enough to handle technical file-sharing solutions often fall back on sneakernet methods like USB sticks or offline social gatherings to gain access to file-shared media. In a more cognitive theoretical terminology (see Larsson’s contribution in this anthology) the gaps may be described as portraying the changing conceptions of right - and wrong – (Larsson 2011b), along with the means for achieving accepted goals, visible in the case of file-sharing norms (Larsson 2011b; Larsson, Svensson, and de Kaminski 2012) and the ways that file-sharers justify their behaviour (Andersson and Larsson 2013). The latter is confirmed in Study 2 in which the respondents in general do not consider file-sharing to be an actual crime. Differentiated from the legal formulations described in Study 5, file-sharing is – at least, in young age groups – not regarded as a criminal act. Rather, it is a normal way of consuming media, where accessibility is more important than legal status. Several of the respondents claim to use different streaming solutions that are still legal for the receiving party within this technical solution, pointing to the fact that simplicity – not legality – is a major issue in contemporary media consumption. Still, a fundamental reason for why social norms are relevant to study in this field is the fact that the corresponding legal regulation is completely locked to a number of key conceptions that will not easily change in the globally homogenous copyright regime. On the contrary, as study 4 shows, legal development has proven to further emphasize more control over longer time and harsher enforcement strategies. The respondents of Study 2 are, in broad terms, aware of the legal situation as presented in Study 4. They have kept themselves informed of legal reinforcements during the last years, but the discussions tend to return to the fact that the number of cases, as referred to in Study 5, remains very low and that no-one personally seems to know anyone that has been charged with anything related to file-sharing. In Study 1 and 3, we clearly see an increased awareness of encryption technologies and services to ensure that one is less identifiable online (Larsson and Svensson 2010; Larsson, Svensson, and de Kaminski 2012; Larsson et al. 2012; Svensson and Larsson 2012). This is an issue that is also mentioned in Study 5, in which the legal rapporteurs write about the problematic increase of anonymity services. However, the respondents in Study 2 do not see this as a major issue, since they generally do not reflect in those terms at all. They do not feel the same legal pressure as the respondents in the other studies. Therefore, this relates to the conceptions of reality in terms of legality, distribution and reproduction of media content, which create a collision between social and legal norms of copyright, analysed in Larsson (2011b). These conceptions of reality likely form a basis for how file-sharers justify their behaviour and relate to both its illegality as well as to what the digitalization of society entails (Larsson 2012a; Andersson and Larsson 2013). Such cross-model conflicts and relations generate unbalanced gap problems, where the distance between different norm-sets is seemingly uneven. The four fields of the FDSL-model suggest six possible relations between different parts of the model. As shown, the relations are often multi-party processes, making both the understanding as well as the solutions to potential problems difficult. The outcome of a process in which new norms emerge can only be understood if all parts of the model are taken into consideration, thus showing the relation between the different parallel processes."
Intellectual property law compliance in Europe: Illegal file sharing and the role of social norms
New Media & Society, Volume 14, Number 7, 2012
The gap between copyright law and social norms has been widely discussed. We have empirically shown the existence of this gap. Theoretically founded in the sociology of law, the study uses a well-defined concept of norms to measure changes in the strength of social norms before and after a legal implementation. The ”IPRED law” was on 1 April 2009 implemented in Sweden, following the EU IPR Enforcement Directive 2004/48/EC. The law aims at enforcing copyright, as well as other IP rights, when violated, especially online. We conducted a survey three months before the IPRED law was implemented in Sweden, and the survey was repeated six months after. The about 1000 respondents between 15 and 25 years-of-age showed, among other things, that although the actual file sharing behaviour had to some extent decreased, the social norms remained unaffected by the law.
Reasons Affecting Frequency of File-Sharing among Finnish Internet Users
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The article examines file-sharing behavior on illegal file-sharing services. We build on an Internet survey (N=6,083) we conducted to Finnish users in 2007. Using the survey data we examine how the respondents' socio-demographic characteristics associate the filesharing. We also examine whether knowledge of law has any impact on file-sharing behavior. We find that the frequent and the infrequent P2P-users share several common attributes with each other. Frequent users are clearly more often male than female, are younger, and possess lower educational qualifications than infrequent users. The results also indicate that the people who are active in P2P-users have weaker legal knowledge about digital copyright issues. The findings and the use of the survey method carry implications for legal and social science scholar work that examines the illegal file-sharing phenomenon.
The Internet and Copyright Protection: Are We Producing a Global Generation of Copyright Criminals?
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
The advent of the Internet poses fundamental changes in social norms, politics and economics in society. The belief in cyber anarchy; "do not touch the Internet" mantra, has fundamentally altered the understanding of copyright laws amongst the present generation. Subsequently an aversion for property rights, as understood by well established copyright laws has, developed manifesting itself mainly through piracy. The evolution of technology in tandem with the Internet has further exacerbated the situation as a whole, generations that enjoy entertainment find it much easier to infringe on a litany of copyright laws. Taking into account the established norms of property or copyright protection, is it not clear, with growing copyright malcontents and malfeasance, that we are simply producing a global generation of copyright criminals. This discourse explores the veracity of this statement by taking into account the nature of the Internet, the emergence of digital copying and sharing, alongside the fluid perceptions of copyright protection.