Abstract
In this article, we draw on a survey conducted with elite upcoming lawyers from all around the world to shed new light on the ethical acceptability of file sharing practices. Although file sharing is typically illegal, our findings show that lawyers overwhelmingly perceive it as an acceptable social practice. The main criterion used by lawyers to decide on the ethical acceptability of file sharing is whether or not the infringer derives any monetary benefits from it. Further, our findings show that lawyers in the public sector (including judiciary and academia) are even more tolerant of online copyright infringement than those in the private sector. Interestingly, our data suggests that this is largely the result of self-selection: lawyers who lean more on the side of broad disclosure and social sharing tend to orient themselves toward the public sector. Implications for the current state of the debate on the reform of copyright law are discussed.
Highlights
In the early 2000s, the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies a la Napster and The Pirate Bay dramatically increased the public’s consumption of digital media—concurrently causing a decrease in industry revenue, as well as an increase in social welfare (De Vany and Walls 2007; Rob and Waldfogel 2006)
We get a clear-cut picture: file sharing ranks relatively high in terms of ethical acceptability, irrespective of the stated reason for engaging in copyright infringement (on average 3.23 out of a 5 points scale, with a standard deviation (SD) of 0.80)
It is interesting to note that this finding suggests that our respondents did not judge the ethical acceptability of the presented scenarios according to the degree to which they fit the American “fair use” doctrine, that is, according to which the presented scenarios are a more or less clear-cut instances of copyright infringement
Summary
In the early 2000s, the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies a la Napster and The Pirate Bay dramatically increased the public’s consumption of digital media—concurrently causing a decrease in industry revenue, as well as an increase in social welfare (De Vany and Walls 2007; Rob and Waldfogel 2006). It is abundantly clear that the perceptions of fairness in copyright as well as practice are increasingly diverting from the letter of the law (Haber 2018) and the views of the lawyers (Litman 1996; Samuelson and Glushko 1989) This is especially true of people actively engaged in online content creation (Fiesler and Bruckman 2014), who often engage in discussions about the ethical and legal aspects of copyright protection (Fiesler, Feuston, and Bruckman 2015). Given the exploratory nature of this conjecture, we loosely formulate our third hypothesis: H3: Non-Western lawyers and/or lawyers coming from developing countries take different ethical positions on the issue of online copyright infringement We see this last hypothesis as expanding a descriptive line of work on individuals’ perceptions of copyright law started by Mandel (2014), who argues that regardless of IP law’s policy objectives, how people understand the law is crucial to the success of the IP system. The third section of the questionnaire was added to the second data collection batch, so that we only collected the corresponding variables for 59 respondents
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