Pirated Research Articles

“Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno”: understanding unauthorised file sharing in online communities from a public goods contribution perspective

PurposeUnauthorised file sharing (UFS) in online communities (OCs) is a major intellectual property concern. Researchers have traditionally viewed UFS as digital piracy and have suggested that deterrents, such as legal actions, should be in place. However, previous research has not considered the OC context and cannot explain why OC members share unauthorised files even when there is legislation against this in place. In OCs, UFS exhibits features of public goods contribution. Therefore, the authors claim that public goods contribution motivations can provide a compelling explanation for UFS in OCs.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a theoretical model in which two egoistic public goods contribution motivations (namely, warm-glow giving and demand for resources) are tested alongside motivations informed by the sanctions described by deterrence theory, a theory widely used within the digital piracy perspective.FindingsThe authors find that warm glow and demand for resources are positively related to UFS in OCs; the effect of warm glow is moderated by users' attachment to OCs. Importantly, the results suggest that although sanctions significantly predict UFS, the effect of sanctions on UFS becomes insignificant in the presence of warm glow, demand for resources and attachment.Originality/valueThe study offers new insights into why users engage in UFS and highlights that public goods contribution should be taken into account in developing anti-piracy policies and practices.

Consumers’ responses to opposing copyright enforcement regimes: When cognitive appraisal leads to compliance vs reactance

Academic studies reveal that copyright enforcement regimes are not reaching their full potential in lowering digital piracy rates. Still, very few demand-side studies tap into the reasons why this occurs. We conducted a scenario-based experiment on a sample of 401 consumers engaged in content streaming. We draw on cognitive appraisal theory to reveal that digital piracy beliefs shape consumers' emotional reactions (positive emotions vs. indignation) differently in opposing copyright enforcement regimes. Through reactance theory, we unfold consumers' coping mechanisms through which they comply with or show reactance to the designated regime (measured by intention to use illegal or legal streaming services). Our findings show that positive digital piracy beliefs drive positive emotions in loose and indignation in tight copyright enforcement regime. In terms of coping, we reveal that compliance to the regime is driven by positive while negative emotions drive reactance. Our study provides valuable insights by revealing antecedents that have not been previously addressed in digital piracy literature. Findings provide value to policymakers and managerial practice to better understand digital piracy's realities and redesign their policies and strategies accordingly.

A Novel Approach to Develop a Movie Piracy Prevention System

Movie piracy has a profound impact on the motion picture industry. These losses in revenue will obviously cause serious financial problems for the studios and even contribute to their current downfall. The aim of the project is to develop an anti-piracy system for movie industries using Steganography technique in MATLAB and to design IR based screen to disable mobile recording and alert system

The Application of Blockchain in Social Media: A Systematic Literature Review

Social media has transformed the mode of communication globally by providing an extensive system for exchanging ideas, initiating business contracts, and proposing new professional ideas. However, there are many limitations to the use of social media, such as misinformation, lack of effective content moderation, digital piracy, data breaches, identity fraud, and fake news. In order to address these limitations, several studies have introduced the application of Blockchain technology in social media. Blockchains can provides transparency, traceability, tamper-proofing, confidentiality, security, information control, and supervision. This paper is a systematic literature review of papers covering the application of Blockchain technology in social media. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic literature review that elucidates the combination of Blockchain and social media. Using several electronic databases, 42 related papers were reviewed. Our findings show that previous studies on the applications of Blockchain in social media are focused mainly on blocking fake news and enhancing data privacy. Research in this domain began in 2017. This review additionally discusses several challenges in applying Blockchain technologies in social media contexts, and proposes alternative ideas for future implementation and research.

To purchase or to pirate: Investigating the role of social influence on digital piracy contagion

To purchase or to pirate: Investigating the role of social influence on digital piracy contagion

Ethical Decision Making in Soft lifting-A UAE Based Case Study

Soft lifting is a type of software piracy that is prevalent in today's computer-dependent world. Soft lifting is a type of software piracy in which software is installed or duplicated in a system in violation of its license agreement. In software development, ethical decisions are critical, as they have a significant impact on end users, organizations, and the environment. As the problem of copying affects soft lifting behaviour, the research lends some credence to the postulates model. Most notably, the study found that one's ethical perspective of soft lifting has no bearing on one's softlifting activity. These findings have significant implications for both software companies and academics who are aiming to prevent piracy through ethics education.

Study of Perceptions of Social Media Users Regarding Digital Ethics

This study aims to determine: 1) an overview of the social demographic characteristics of social media users, 2) knowledge of social media users regarding digital ethics, and 3) perceptions of social media users regarding digital ethics from the social media they use. The method of collecting data in the field is a survey using a questionnaire distributed to respondents online with the help of google forms and sampling is done by purposive sampling, with a total sample of 250 respondents. The variables used in this study include: demographic and social characteristics, user knowledge of ethics in the use of social media, and user perceptions of ethics in the use of social media. The data analysis technique used descriptive analysis. The description of the knowledge of social media users regarding digital ethics includes the Law on Information and Electronic Transactions (UU ITE) and the regulations and sanctions contained in the ITE Law, it was found that most respondents stated they knew, while there was a large percentage of respondents answered that expressed Doubtful and didn't know, as well as a small percentage of answers: knew very well and didn't really know. Respondents' perceptions of digital ethics include privacy and security, ethics in posting on social media, cyber bullying, Hoax, plagiarism, End-User piracy, Software Piracy, Unauthorized Use, Hackers, Terms of use, Personnel security, Fair Use, it was obtained that the outline has a positive perception and only a small percentage of respondents have a negative perception.

АЛГОРИТМ ДИНАМИЧЕСКОГО КООРДИНАТНО-ПЕРЕМЕННОГО ВНЕДРЕНИЯ И АВТОМАТИЧЕСКОГО ОБНАРУЖЕНИЯ НЕВИДИМЫХ РОБАСТНЫХ ЦИФРОВЫХ ВОДЯНЫХ ЗНАКОВ В ЧАСТОТНОЙ ОБЛАСТИ ВИДЕОПОТОКА

Одним из способов внедрения цифровых водяных знаков является преобразование в частотной области изображения. В статье предлагается алгоритм динамического внедрения цифровых водяных знаков в видеоданные. Global scientific and technological progress contributes to the continuous growth of multimedia content in the global network. In some cases, when creating and distributing unique video information, the task of copyright protection arises, as well as the task of unambiguous identification of the content source. Therefore, the preservation of protected, stable and visually imperceptible signs with information about the sources of reproduction in the structure of the video stream is an urgent task. A common method of protecting multimedia information from unauthorized distribution is the introduction of digital watermarks in the video sequence. One of the ways to introduce digital watermarks is to transform in the frequency domain of the image. At the same time, any changes in the frequency spectrum will certainly lead to image distortion and the appearance of artifacts. Therefore, the method of implementing a hidden message should provide as little visual distortion of video data as possible. At the same time, the hidden message must be robust enough to remain retrievable after various impacts and operations with video data. The article proposes an algorithm for the dynamic implementation of digital watermarks in video data, which consists in changing the coordinates of the marker insertion according to the law of pseudorandom sequence.

Is music piracy over? Comparing music piracy attitudes and behaviors between young generations

AbstractTo understand and predict the consumer patterns of generational groups within a highly technological world, it is critical to study their experiences, social views, and attitudes about music. Today, limited information is available to the research community about “Gen Z,” a population group that recently entered college life and the next largest consumer group after the Millennials. This study aims at closing this gap by exploring and comparing distinctive patterns and consumer behavior in the music market between Gen Z and Millennials. Using a group of 1624 college students from two universities in the United States, we found that Gen Z is less prone to music piracy than Millennials, and those who pirate music tend to share similar social norms, a limited understanding of copyright infringements, and poor views about the music industry. New technologies are also transforming the way future generations are drawn into music piracy. We conclude that music infringement will continue to be an ethical dilemma and the industry should continue in its effort to design consumer policies to assist young generations.

Deterrence and defiance as responses to copyright enforcement policies of digital content: appraisal tendency perspective

PurposeToday, digital piracy remains a growing challenge for legislators and businesses operating in the entertainment industry. For these reasons, policymakers place significant efforts in reducing piracy activities through copyright enforcement policies. Yet, the effectiveness of these frameworks remains questionable since empirical evidence offers countervailing insights. For these reasons, this study adopts a demand-side approach to investigate how users' emotional reactions to the copyright enforcement policy influence their digital piracy-related judgments and intention.Design/methodology/approachThe author used a scenario-based approach to test the hypotheses and surveyed 262 users who actively stream movies and TV shows.FindingsBy drawing on the appraisal tendency framework, the author finds that among individuals experiencing fear due to the copyright enforcement policy, there is a decreasing intention to continue using illegal streaming services. On the contrary, individuals experiencing indignation are more likely to have increased intention to use illegal streaming services. On top of this, we reveal indirect effects by mediating individuals' vulnerability to sanctions (fear path) and subjective norms (indignation path) as judgments cues.Originality/valueThe author contributes to digital piracy literature in two ways with the study. First, the author unfolds the affective background that explains the emergence of deterrence or defiance effects when users respond to the copyright enforcement policy. Thus, the author shows that fear is a trigger for decreasing while indignation increases the usage of illegal streaming services. Second, through the appraisal tendency framework, the author enriches the literature by theorizing and providing empirical evidence on how previously established vulnerability to sanctions and subjective norms reinforce affective influences on encouraging or discouraging digital piracy intentions. Overall, the findings also provide policymakers with original insights on designing their copyright enforcement tools to combat digital piracy further.

Effects of Enduring Involvement on Intention toward Digital Piracy: The Case of Japanese Anime

Recently, digital piracy has been a major problem in the content industry, and a massive amount of anime has been illegally uploaded to the Internet in Japan. Previous studies have drawn on social psychology theories to explore the motivation to pirate entertainment media. This research, however, attempts to apply the concept of consumer involvement to find possible factors affecting intention toward piracy. The author focuses on enduring involvement and its facets in the context of leisure activities. Data were primally obtained from Japanese undergraduate/graduate students through an online survey, and a partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the model developed. As a result, the following two effects on intention were confirmed with statistical significance: risk consequence of watching anime (positive and moderate) and moral obligation (negative and strong). From these findings, the author recommends that stakeholders commit to enlightening anime viewers about the importance of stopping digital piracy, and encouraging them to be more proactive in using free, official services to mitigate the risk for anime consumers.

A brand hegemony rejection explanation for digital piracy

PurposeThis paper aims to uncover the influence of copyright holder/digital media policies on digital piracy behavior using the brand hegemony rejection (BHR) theory.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis of in-depth personal interview data from active digital pirates is analyzed using BHR theory.FindingsBHR is found useful in understanding pirating motivations, which vary greatly across time and across digital mediums. Piracy is often motivated by profit enhancing policies of big media copyright holders, which are deemed unfair and not customer-oriented, but such motivations are greatly reduced when copyright holders offer attractive legal means to obtain digital content. Pirates generally do not feel sympathy for large media companies, but some pirates feel guilt that their actions may hurt digital content creators.Research limitations/implicationsThe relatively small sample of pirates is primarily from Norway and hence may not be representative of other media markets.Practical implicationsA large portion of digital piracy can potentially be eliminated if copyright holders are customer focused and offer desired content with a format and price that are deemed fair. The technical skills of pirates are high, and they can resort to piracy whenever they feel rights holders are not customer-oriented.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first application of BHR theory to the digital piracy arena, and it is found to provide useful insights in explaining the rise and fall of piracy. This application of the BHR theory also suggests it might be usefully applied to the study of other ethically questionable consumer activities.

Protecting Ownership Rights of Videos Against Digital Piracy: An Efficient Digital Watermarking Scheme

Violation of one’s intellectual ownership rights by the others is a common problem which entertainment industry frequently faces now-a-days. Sharing of information over social media platforms such as Instagram, WhatsApp and twitter without giving credit the owner causes huge financial losses to the owner and hence needs an immediate attention. Digital watermarking is a promising technique to protect owners’ right against digital piracy. Most of the state-of-the-art techniques does not provides adequate level of resilience against majority of video specific attacks and other commonly applied attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a highly transparent and robust video watermarking solution to protect the owners rights by first convert each video frame into YCbCr color components and then select twenty five strongest speeded-up robust features (SURF) points of the normalized luminance component as points for both watermark embedding and extraction. After applying variety of geometric, simple signal processing and video specific attacks on the watermarked video meticulous analysis is performed using popular metrics which reveals that the proposed scheme possesses high correlation value which makes it superior for practical applications against these attacks. The scheme also proposes a novel three-level impairment scale for subjective analysis which gives stable results to derive correct conclusions.

Legal Control Over Copyright Protection Using Blockchain Technology

The development of digital information technologies predetermined the need to develop technical and legal mechanisms of copyright protection. Now the share of copyright in the national economies of most countries is very significant and continues to grow, the main task of national legal systems is to find and implement technical and legal solutions to protect copyright from digital piracy. One of these solutions is block chain technology. The relevance of the research topic rests at the novelty of this technology and the lack of study of issues in the field of theory and law enforcement related to the adaptation and legitimation of relations using block chain technologies, including in the field of copyright protection. The purpose of this article is to analyze the legal qualifications of block chain technology and its application in the field of copyright protection, legitimization of relations associated with the use of block chain technologies in the field of copyright protection. The study revealed that the block chain has features that allow for classification of this technology as a type of technical means of copyright protection, which is the theoretical significance of this study. It has been established that in the field of copyright protection, the block chain performs the function of fixing and confirming the legitimacy of ownership by the author or other right holder of the corresponding work, and provides control over access to the work during authorized use. In the course of the study, the authors assessed the provisions of the current procedural legislation for the use of block chain technologies as evidence in court proceedings for copyright protection and revealed that information from the block chain, including those confirming authorship, can be recognized by the courts as evidence.

Piracy and the commodification of originality in translation

Abstract Translation is often considered in relation to the original, as if the original were always singular, fixed, stable, and incontestable. Readers, translators, and publishers, however, may approach the concept of original(ity) from diverse perspectives, conditioned by specific sociocultural contexts. Using Chinese translations of the Australian novel The Thorn Birds as a case study, this article situates its examination of original(ity) in the context of Chinese publishing industries, in which copyright laws and piracy unusually co-exist. The resultant tension between authorized publishers and counterfeiters gives rise to a situation where originality is highly commodified and thus frequently reconstructed. Translation research on original(ity), therefore, must move beyond legal and ethical dimensions to include economic, political, and historical contexts. Original(ity), which may be considered a collective property of both the original(s) and the translation(s), has to be constantly reinterpreted in a given sociocultural context at each new historical moment.

MinerAlert: an hybrid approach for web mining detection

The introduction of new memory-based crypto-mining techniques and the rise of new web technologies like WebAssembly, made the use of browsers for crypto-currencies mining more and more convenient and popular. That, in turn, originated a new form of computer piracy, called cryptojacking, which is rapidly gaining ground on the web. A cryptojacking site exploits its visitors’ hardware resources to secretly mine crypto-currencies. This paper analyzes current web-based cryptojacking detection methods in order to propose a novel hybrid strategy. Current detection methods are found to require either considerable computer administration skills or execution privileges usually not available to common users. In this view, a method, named MinerAlert, has been designed and proposed, aiming at detecting in real-time sites performing cryptojacking. To address the limitations of current methods, the method implementation has been achieved through a browser extension. The present paper describes the method’s details and its implementation. It also reports the experimental results of its utilization, showing its positive performances in terms of ease of use, successful detections and speed.

Data Hiding in 3D-Medical Image

Information hiding strategies have recently gained popularity in a variety of fields. Digital audio, video, and images are increasingly being labelled with distinct but undetectable marks that may contain a hidden copyright notice or serial number, or even directly help to prevent unauthorized duplication. This approach is extended to medical images by hiding secret information in them using the structure of a different file format. The hidden information may be related to the patient. In this paper, a method for hiding secret information in DICOM images is proposed based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT). Firstly. segmented all slices of a 3D-image into a specific block size and collecting the host image depend on a generated key, secondly selected the block number and slice number, thirdly, the low-high band used for embedding after adding the generated number, fourthly, used the Hessenberg transform on the blocks that portioned the band (low-high) in a specific size. The secret information (image or text) is a binary value. It was embedded by setting the positive value in the diagonal to odd values if the embedded is one and setting it to even if the secret bit is zero. Several tests were applied, such as applying mean square error, peak signal to noise ratio PSNR, and structural similarity index measure SSIM. Some analyses such as adding noise, scaling, and rotation analysis are applied to test the efficiency. The results of the tests showed the strength of the proposed method.

Psychopathic personality disorder and cybercriminality: an outline of the issue.

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has created a new dimension in interpersonal relationships, which is commonly called cyberspace. Structural features of cyberspace such as anonymity, the lack of non-verbal indicators of interaction, their asynchrony, a sense of impunity and the lack of specific norms of conduct cause that the behavior of some people online may differ significantly from their behavior in real life. Individuals with psychopathic personality disorder can use cyberspace for criminal activities such as cyberbullying, trolling, digital piracy, cybervandalism or data theft. This is a very significant problem, as some researchers predict that as digital communication develops, 'cyberpsychopaths' will become the dominant form of criminals. Currently, there is a lack of research on the relationship between the structural features of cyberspace and the expression of psychopathic personality traits and their role in committing cybercrimes.

TECHNICAL SECURITY IN ITE LAW AND COPYRIGHTS OF DEVICES AND SYSTEMS

Copyright is the creator's or recipient's exclusive right to publish or reproduce his work, or to grant permission to do so, without reducing the restrictions imposed by applicable laws and regulations. This research aims to determine how the legal protection of creators for the use of illegal software is based on the Copyrights Law No. 19 of 2002. The study employs normative law research methods, as well as secondary data obtained through library research. According to the findings, product piracy costs the creator both financially and morally, as well as having an economic impact on the country. Aside from that, using pirated software raises a fatal risk because malware/viruses can easily infiltrate software, opening the way for cyber attacks. As a consequence, it is recommended that legal proprietary software be used for work, learning, or other software-related activities. If people are unable to obtain legal software due to a lack of resources, they should consider other options, such as open source software that is available for free. Furthermore, proprietary software (closed) vendors must be able to offer reasonable prices. If a person or company infringes on another's copyright, they could face criminal charges or civil lawsuits.

Software protection and software piracy

AbstractThis paper explores the dynamic long‐term relationship between software protection and software piracy rates across 108 countries over the period of 20 years (1994–2015), with the help of the ARDL model. The analysis employs a new way of utilising the membership duration of Trade related Intellectual Property Rights agreement and World Intellectual Property Organisation Copyright Treaty agreements of different countries in a panel framework, apart from constructing an index of copyright software protection by focusing on enforcement provisions. The paper overcomes various shortcomings of earlier literatures by thoughtful inclusion of independent variables and methodological techniques. Results show that both copyright software protection and income share a negative long‐term relationship with software piracy. Even the enforcement provisions are important in mitigating software piracy. In addition, the model finds a negative relationship between demand for intellectual property protection and software piracy rates.