The Determinants of Digital Piracy Behaviour in Malaysia

Abstract

The advancement of technology has facilitated sustainable and significant development in supporting digitalisation of business operations, including but not limited to electronic commerce, but also resulting in a significant increase in digital crimes, particularly online piracy. Many consumers seek out pirated content and the majority of them do not perceive it as something that could eventually harm the creative industry or perceive it as a wrong practice. Therefore, the problem of online piracy becomes rampant. This research investigates the direct and indirect relationships between deviant peer associations, perceived benefits, attitude towards digital piracy, subjective norms, self-efficacy, digital piracy intention and actual digital piracy behaviour. A total of 450 samples were gathered via an online self-administered questionnaire survey. The data was evaluated by structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). According to the statistical findings, all of the direct and indirect relationships among the seven variables are significantly supported. This study provides theoretical and managerial implications by demonstrating that digital piracy intention has a significant relationship on actual digital piracy behaviour as well as deviant peer associations have a significant relationship on an individual’s attitude towards digital piracy. This study concludes with some limitations and recommendations for the future digital piracy research.