Initial Exploration of Cross-Generational Attitudes Towards Piracy of Chinese Online Literature

This chapter seeks to provide initial evidence and provide a baseline for further exploration of Chinese cross-generational audiences' attitude differences towards online literature and digital piracy. Globalization has complicated the many disparate cultural, generational, and national perspectives on intellectual property (IP) protection. IP and IP protection continue to grow in importance in global commerce and international relations. How attitudes towards IP and online content, in particular, evolve generationally is an area of relative under exploration. Data was gathered through an online survey and indicates a trend towards increased awareness and acceptance of IP value and protection. This study provides insight into cross-generational audiences in the important market of China. It may be helpful to those interested in commerce in the areas of online publishing or related industries to help make business decisions in targeting and marketing, to those interested in global commerce and international relations, or those who are researchers in the areas of IP and IP protection.

Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy

When most people think of piracy, they think of Bittorrent and The Pirate Bay. These public manifestations of piracy, though, conceal an elite worldwide, underground, organized network of pirate groups who specialize in obtaining media – music, videos, games, and software – before their official sale date and then racing against one another to release the material for free. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy is the first scholarly research book about this underground subculture, which began life in the pre-internet era Bulletin Board Systems and moved to internet File Transfer Protocol servers (“topsites”) in the mid- to late-1990s. The “Scene,” as it is known, is highly illegal in almost every aspect of its operations. The term “Warez” itself refers to pirated media, a derivative of “software.” Taking a deep dive in the documentary evidence produced by the Scene itself, Warez describes the operations and infrastructures an underground culture with its own norms and rules of participation, its own forms of sociality, and its own artistic forms. Even though forms of digital piracy are often framed within ideological terms of equal access to knowledge and culture, Eve uncovers in the Warez Scene a culture of competitive ranking and one-upmanship that is at odds with the often communalist interpretations of piracy. Broad in scope and novel in its approach, Warez is indispensible reading for anyone interested in recent developments in digital culture, access to knowledge and culture, and the infrastructures that support our digital age.

Distribution of creative works protected by copyright

This article addresses possible structural alternatives for the dissemination of the results of intellectual activity (RIA), which reflect setting of optimal price and level of technical protection. The paper argues that digital piracy is not always a negative factor for the author or copyright owner but may be a signal indicating an inefficiently of RIA distributing method. The developed model demonstrates the choice of RIA distribution strategy depending on various factors: author's popularity, the difference in quality between the original RIA and pirated copy, legal protection level. The findings regarding the possibilities of combining legal and technical protection, consumer behavior and the positive effects of digital piracy will help the regulator to apply more effective measures. The article is written on the basis of the RANEPA state assignment research program.

Digital Piracy among Young Adults: The Role of Values and Time Perspectives

The aim of the research is to measure the extent of piracy among young adults and to relate this phenomenon to variables, such as values and time orientation. The research fits into the risk paradigm of cyber research. The research was carried out in Northern Cyprus, a country with a persistently high rate of digital piracy. The research involved 318 young adults (Mean Age: 20.9, SD: 2.47). The research process was conducted through the triangulation of three questionnaires: Piracy Risk Scale, Time Perspective Inventory, and the Values Scale. Based on the data collected, it was noted that piracy is not a rare phenomenon among young people (similar to other e-risks), and it is most common for files related to entertainment to be systematically downloaded. Digital piracy is linked to the level of digital competence, as well as hedonistic and fatalistic attitudes to time and values such as materialism and sense of honour. Despite technological developments maximising the legal circulation of cultural and other digital content, piracy has still not been completely eliminated.

Towards a general model explaining physical and digital counterfeits

PurposeDemand for fake physical and digital products is a global phenomenon with substantive detrimental effects on companies and consumers. This raises various questions and issues, such as whether there are generalizable explanations of purchase intentions.Design/methodology/approachThis research is based on consumer samples from three different countries. This paper develops and tests a model based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to explain both the demand for counterfeits and digital piracy. Respondents were questioned about physical products (e.g. clothing, accessories) from well-known brands and digital products (e.g. software, music).FindingsSocially oriented motives such as embarrassment potential, ethical concerns and social norms explain the intention to purchase fake physical and digital products, while personally oriented motives (e.g. self-identity) have indirect effects but not a direct impact on purchase intention.Research limitations/implicationsAs our results show, we find evidence for a general model – contributing and supporting our first and primary research goal of providing a theoretically robust model that bridges the gap between two streams of literature.Practical implicationsThe fact that drivers of buying counterfeit physical and digital goods are similar across countries provides justification for companies and international organizations to bundle their efforts and thus leverage them more strongly on a global scale.Originality/valueWe provide a basis for consolidating future research on demand for counterfeits and pirated goods because underlying factors driving demand are similar across the three countries studied herein.

Blockchain-Based Smart Propertization of Digital Content for Intellectual Rights Protection

Several platform companies have been successful in competing with digital piracy by producing consumer-friendly services. Nowadays, however, the digital content service market has become more monopolized than ever, which forms barriers to the entry of new platform companies. The platform monopoly would cause considerable problems both to content providers and consumers as it limits the choice of consumers. To remove the platform monopoly in digital content markets, we propose a public blockchain-based digital content service method. The proposed method encrypts the digital content to a self-decryptable form, which we call Smart Propertized Digital Content (SPDC), and utilizes the decentralization and traceability of the public blockchain to provide a non-monopolistic ecosystem for the management and distribution of the SPDC license. The proposed method can be more beneficial both to content creators and users than the current winner-takes-all platform model. For instance, users can download SPDC once and play many times without requesting the decryption key, and SPDC owners can make SPDC licenses to be time-limited, device-limited, resellable, or terminated without resorting to help from other intermediaries. We conducted the threat analysis on the proposed method by examining possible attacks in various scenarios. Based on threat analysis, we conclude that the proposed method can provide a new type of digital content service ecosystem that can be operated in a completely decentralized way and neutrally beneficial to all participants.