Ethics, neutralization, and digital piracy

Abstract

Digital piracy happens every day. Piracy negatively impacts the growth of digital product industries. Morals, ethics and neutralization are hypothesized to affect digital piracy. Pirating digital products at various levels of seriousness and product types is interesting in terms of behaviour and for business interests. Our research objectives were to study consumer behaviours towards digital piracy, to compare effects of neutralization and ethics on digital piracy, and to explore differences in neutralization, ethics, and digital piracy between genders, and heavy and light downloaders. Our findings suggested that personal morals decrease digital piracy mainly in the first phase, whereas neutralization is used by individuals to support their behaviour throughout other phases.