Intention to Engage in Digital Piracy

Abstract

Digital piracy represents a significant threat to the marketers of digital service products. Industry efforts to attenuate the practice, often deterrent in nature, have largely failed. We propose that one reason for this failure is the absence of a commensurably accepted model of the social psychological foundations underlying digital piracy behaviors. A modified version of Perugini and Bagozzi's (2001) Model of Goal Directed Behavior is advocated and empirically validated across both movie and music industry settings for this purpose. The results support the theoretical and empirical efficacy of the proposed model and highlight the importance of attitudes toward the act of digital piracy, the frequency of past digital piracy behaviors, and the motivations and intentions underlying digital piracy. A normative framework is proposed with five actionable recommendations to assist digital service marketers in better addressing digital piracy. The research implications of the reported study are also presented and discussed.