Tougher Legislation Hasn’t Affected File Sharing

Ever since the birth of Napster, copyright holders have been successfully lobbying governments around the world to impose tougher legislation on their citizens to prosecute those caught sharing copyrighted movies, music, and software. However, these new pieces of legislation have done little to change people’s behaviour with Lund University’s Cybernorms research project finding that file sharing is staying roughly stable between 15 and 25 year olds because they don;t believe they are doing anything wrong.

It appears that the tougher legislation doesn’t get much help from teachers, parents, or anyone else in forming social norms amongst young people either with Cybernorms saying

Our results show that young people feel no pressure from neighbors, friends, relatives, teachers etc. to refrain from file sharing. A higher degree of pressure or social control would most possibly have a clear impact on habits and practices regarding file sharing.

All tougher legislation has caused is an increase in young people hiding their file sharing activities through the use of VPNs, with 40% of them now using these privacy protections according to the study. But the lack of support for this legislation outside of the copyright industries and those in government who have had their hands greased by lobbyists makes the legislation basically redundant as copyright infringement is considered pretty much the same as speeding – in that it is against the law but everyone does it and just a minority, generally the most brazen, get caught.

[via Torrent Freak]