Pirates’ Gold: Consumers and the Counterfeiting of Electronic Media

Jason Rutter

Abstract

The piracy of digital media over the internet has received much legal and media attention over the last few years. Peer-to-peer clients such as Napster and Grokster have been the focus of legal action and file swapping has been held responsible for a significant decline in the value of CDs sales. Through both media reporting and more spectacular academic analysis, downloaders of pirated content - including music, film, games and business software - have been portrayed a criminals rather than consumers and framed as part of a specific internet subculture. Using data gathered from postal and web surveys this presentation questions how reliable such a viewpoint is. It takes a first look at whether there is value in seeing the consumption of counterfeits as part of more general consumption practice. To do this it looks at key practices and motivations of consumers of pirated goods downloaded from the internet as well as their awareness of potential problems associated with the activity. Finally it poses some questions about what the implications for adopting such a view of counterfeiting may be.

Paper presented at SPRU & CENTRIM's Collaborative Seminar Series, University of Sussex, 2nd June 2006.

[Slides - 1.5Mb Mov] [Jason Rutter]

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