IP Outreach Research > IP Crime
Reference
| Title: | Money for Nothing and Hits for Free: The Ethics of Downloading Music from Peer-To-Peer Web Sites |
| Author: | Aron M Levin, Mary Conway Dato-on and Kenneth Rhee [Northern Kentucky University] |
| Source: | Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice 12, no. 1: 48-60 |
| Year: | 2004 |
Details
| Subject/Type: | Piracy |
| Focus: | Music |
| Country/Territory: | United States of America |
| Objective: | To determine the ethical attitudes of college students towards: downloading music without paying, record companies and recording artists. |
| Sample: | College students: 21 for the qualitative study and 210 for the quantitative study |
| Methodology: | Qualitative preliminary study: students wrote a reaction paper to an article about the Napster controversy for their Marketing course. Quantitative main study: a questionnaire based on the results from the preliminary study, completed during class for extra credit |
Main Findings
Compared to those who have not illegally downloaded music from the Internet, downloaders: have lesser ethical concern; are more likely to believe that downloading does not harm record companies/artists; are more likely to agree that record companies are making excessive profits; are more likely to use high-speed Internet connections; have larger CD collections; and have purchased more CDs in the past 6 months.
Downloading music is not always a substitute for purchasing and may actually be a form of product sampling. While downloaders were more likely to agree that record companies are making excessive profits, they are not more likely to agree that artists are making excessive profits.
[Date Added: Aug 12, 2008 ]