[News] The Attitude of Public Towards Internet Piracy.

Over the year, entertainment Industries especially movie and music industry had been making effort to sue and taking down massive file sharing site to educate the user that piracy is wrong and causes real damage. On the whole, it all don't seem to be working particularly right.

Under a study published by Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, questioned participants on morals and ethics, and included discussion on which laws they believe are socially acceptable to break. The Danish study, which ultimately concluded that moral standards are just as high as they were 10 years ago, covered issues such as tax evasion, insurance fraud, the morality gap between men and women and, to the interest of TorrentFreak readers, piracy.

In the piracy section the people were ask to give an answer between the scale from 1 - 10 wherever unauthorized download is an act that can be socially acceptable. The result of the research shows that 7 out of 10 those questioned felt to a greater or lesser degree that is socially acceptable. Around 15-20% of the total group think that it is totally socially acceptable act. A very small amount of people between the 30% voted for the bottom of the scale which is totally unacceptable.

Interestingly, with the anti piracy campaigns showing out none stop, the attitudes of the public don't seem to changed much over the past decade. When a question asked in the 1997 study about wherever is it acceptable to use pirated software, the same proportion of 3-10 people said it was unacceptable.

However, when come to the study on 2010, a question on wherever is it acceptable to download pirated software and sell it to friend to gain profit, 3 out of 4 people said it would be completely unacceptable.

As the results of the study, it shows that it is nearly impossible for copyright holders or anti-piracy groups to change the attitudes of the public in their favor. If they want piracy to decrease, their best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate, there seems to be more opportunities in that area.

Based of the article, do you think that the attitude of the public against internet piracy will changed?

If you are a member of the copyright holders or the anti-piracy groups, what will you do to change the attitude of public againts internet piracy?

Source : http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-socially-acceptable-110228/(last retrieve at 2 March 2011 8:07PM)

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