Attitudes towards software piracy in South Africa: Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws as a moderator

Abstract

The aims of the study were to describe the relationship between all three of Kohlberg's levels of moral development and attitudes towards software piracy as well as to determine if an individual's Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws moderated this relationship. The research exploring moral development and attitudes towards software piracy is limited in that the results are inconclusive and often do not assess higher levels of moral development. In this study, we explore some of the early antecedent relationships in the theory of reasoned action. An exploratory, non-experimental, cross-sectional survey design was used and a questionnaire containing three scales (attitudes towards software piracy, levels of moral development and Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws) were obtained from a sample of 402 respondents from three medium-sized South African organisations and from an online survey on a prominent South African online information technology magazine. The results indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between the respondents’ attitudes to software piracy and levels of moral development. Additionally, there are significant relationships between attitudes towards software piracy and each of the levels of moral development. Level 2 moral development predicted the most amount of variance in attitudes towards software piracy. The moderated multiple linear regression revealed that the Knowledge of Intellectual Property Laws did not have a moderating effect on the relationship between attitudes towards software piracy and moral development. These findings provide a more in-depth analysis of the relationship between attitudes and levels of moral development with respect to software piracy.