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Title:
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THE ETHICS AND INDIFFERENT BEHAVIOUR OF YOUNG DIGITAL CONTENT CONSUMERS ANALYSIS OF AN INTERVIEW STUDY |
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Author(s):
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Veikko Halttunen, Markus Makkonen, Lauri Frank |
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ISBN:
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978-972-8939-20-5 |
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Editors:
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Gunilla Bradley |
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Year:
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2010 |
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Edition:
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Single |
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Keywords:
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Consumer behaviour, digital content, ethics, piracy. |
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Type:
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Full Paper |
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First Page:
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75 |
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Last Page:
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82 |
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Language:
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English |
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Cover:
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Full Contents:
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click to dowload 
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Paper Abstract:
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Digital piracy has been a proliferating problem during the last ten years. New technological innovations in the areas of telecommunication and social media have provided a myriad of opportunities to use digital content illegally. Unauthorized use of music and videos that can be downloaded or directly streamed from the Internet has changed the traditional forms of piracy like duplicating software or burning music CDs. The Internet provides almost endless resources of illegal digital contents that can be acquired easily, rapidly and with low risk to be caught. Explanations and solutions for the piracy problems have especially been sought from two directions: (1) technology (e.g. P2P, DRM) and (2) the ethics of consumer behaviour. In this paper, we provide an interview study that explores the ethical thinking and actual behaviour of digital content consumers. The study consisted of fourteen interviews. All interviewees were young adults (19-31 years), seven of them were male and seven female. The study reveals incoherence in the interviewees ethical thinking. Given that ethical behaviour is assumed to be correlated with ethical attitudes and thinking, we argue that (1) there is a chance to improve consumers ethical behaviour by increasing their ethical consciousness and (2) this potential should also be capitalized since fighting digital piracy requires multiple actions of which improved ethical consciousness is one. |
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