Studying norms and social change in a digital age (original) (raw)

2013, In Baier, M. (ed.) Social and Legal Norms. London: Ashgate.

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."