Non-Commercial digital piracy has seen an unprecedented rise in the wake of the digital revolution; with wide-scale downloading and sharing of copyrighted media online, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Bringing together perspectives from criminology, psychology, business, and adopting a morally neutral stance, this book offers a holistic overview of this growing phenomenon. It considers its cultural, commercial, and legal aspects, and brings together international research on a range of topics, such as copyright infringement, intellectual property, music publishing, movie piracy, and changes in consumer behaviour. This book offers a new perspective to the growing literature on cybercrime and digital security. This multi-disciplinary book is the first to bring together international research on digital piracy and will be key reading for researchers in the fields of criminology, psychology, law and business.

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.

The complex world of online piracy and peer-to-peer file sharing is skillfully condensed into an easy-to-understand guide that provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, while offering guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file-sharing activities. While the actual impact of digital piracy is nearly impossible to precisely calculate, the threat of financial damage from illegal peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to the world's highest-grossing entertainment firms (and even entire industries!) has garnered attention from government, industry, and academic leaders and criminal justice professionals. Oftentimes, those providing access to computers and file sharing capabilities-parents, schools, libraries-don't know about or understand these activities and, therefore, put themselves and their families at risk for criminal and civil prosecution. This work describes the technological, legal, social, and ethical facets of illegal peer-to-peer file sharing. Geared toward parents, teachers, librarians, students, and any other computer user engaged in file sharing, this book will help readers to understand all forms of traditional and digital copyright violations of protected music, movies, and software. To date over 18,000 P2P users have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Most of these users have been college students and parents of high-school students. While word of these law suits are spreading, and many parents fear that their children may be using a family computer to illegally download and share copyrighted works, few supervising adults have the technical knowledge needed to determine whether and to what extent pirating may be occurring via a computer and Internet connection they are legally responsible for. Additionally, while P2P networks are filled with millions of users with billions of copyrighted files, few users understand the ways in which they are illegally using computers and other mobile electronic devices to download protected content. While describing both technical and social issues, this book primarily focuses on the social aspects of illegal file sharing, and provides technical concepts at a general level. Fisk skillfully condenses the complex nature of file sharing systems into an easy-to-understand guide, provides insight into the criminal justice approach to illegal file sharing, and offers guidance to parents and students who have concerns about potential legal action in response to file sharing activities.

EBOOK AND PRINT ON DEMAND COPIES ARE AVAILABLE VIA REDSHELF The practice of illegally downloading copyrighted materials continues to spread globally, costing the entertainment industry and governments billions of dollars each year. Why do some people take part in this behavior? Award-winning authors, Dr. George E. Higgins and Dr. Catherine D. Marcum, address this question in Digital Piracy: An Integrated Theoretical Approach. This book provides practitioners working in information technology outside of academia, students, and scholars in multiple disciplines an integrated approach to understanding why this behavior occurs. Drawing from the empirical literature and theories from several disciplines including business, economics, information technology, sociology, law and criminology, this book brings the known facts about digital piracy in America together in one place. This book takes an important step by presenting an integrated theory, derived from the theoretical and research literatures, for understanding digital piracy that provides suggestions for reducing instances of digital piracy behavior. The teacher's manual will be available electronically on a CD or via email. Please contact Beth Hall at [email protected] to request a copy. "Relying on data sources like the Uniform Crime Reports, the National Crime Victimization Survey, and data provided by the Business Software Alliance, and merging economic, sociological, criminological, and information technology and computer science theories of piracy, the authors succeed in showing the prevalence of distinct piracy forms. Moreover, Higgins and Marcum succeed in developing and offering directions to apply an integrated explanatory framework of digital piracy.... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above." -- CHOICE Magazine

This book builds an empirical basis towards creating broader prevention and intervention programs in curbing digital piracy. It addresses the psychosocial, cultural and criminological factors associated with digital piracy to construct more efficient problem-solving mechanisms. Digital piracy including online piracy involves illegal copying of copyrighted materials. This practice costs the software industry, entertainment industry, and governments billions of dollars every year. Reports of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and Business Software Alliance (BSA) view piracy largely in the light of economic factors; the assumption being that only those who cannot afford legitimate copies of software, music, and movies indulge in it. Drawing on research and theories from various disciplines like psychology, sociology, criminology, and law, the authors have designed an empirical study to understand the contribution of psychological, cultural and criminological factors to digital piracy. The chapters include data from India and China, which continue to be on the Special 301 report priority watch list of the WIPO, and Serbia, which has been on the watch list 4 times. They examine the role of self-control, self-efficacy, perceived punishment severity, awareness about digital piracy, peer influence, neutralization techniques, novelty seeking, pro-industry factors and other socio-demographic factors in predicting digital piracy. This book addresses a large readership, comprising academics and researchers in psychology, criminology and criminal justice, law and intellectual property rights, social sciences, and IT, as well as policymakers, to better understand and deal with the phenomenon of digital piracy.

"A collection of texts that takes a broad perspective on digital piracy and attempts to capture the multidimensional impacts of digital piracy on capitalist society today"--

Non-Commercial digital piracy has seen an unprecedented rise in the wake of the digital revolution; with wide-scale downloading and sharing of copyrighted media online, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens. Bringing together perspectives from criminology, psychology, business, and adopting a morally neutral stance, this book offers a holistic overview of this growing phenomenon. It considers its cultural, commercial, and legal aspects, and brings together international research on a range of topics, such as copyright infringement, intellectual property, music publishing, movie piracy, and changes in consumer behaviour. This book offers a new perspective to the growing literature on cybercrime and digital security. This multi-disciplinary book is the first to bring together international research on digital piracy and will be key reading for researchers in the fields of criminology, psychology, law and business.