Neutralizing Music Piracy: An Empirical Examination

Abstract

The current study sought to test the viability of employing Sykes and Matza's (1957) techniques of neutralization as a framework for understanding online music piracy. Using data from a sample of 2,032 undergraduates from a large Midwestern university, the relevance of neutralization theory is tested via multinomial logistic regression while controlling for other theoretical predictors and demographic variables. The findings indicated that greater acceptance of the techniques associated with denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of victim, and appeal to higher loyalties significantly predicted moderate levels of piracy participation. Furthermore, the effect of appeals to higher loyalty on piracy was found to be conditioned by the respondent's approval of the behavior. Overall, results suggested that university settings may unwittingly facilitate a climate for online piracy whereby students place a higher value on group norms rather than legal norms and do not consider the harms associated with the behavior.

This article is based on a paper presented at the 2006 American Society of Criminology Conference, Los Angeles, CA

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

¹This piece focuses on unauthorized music files that are a violation of copyright laws. Similar to how “DOC” files are text representations or formats along with “TXT” and “WPD,” MP3s are audio representations—a specific unprotected, freely available digital music file format. In the current research, the terms “MP3” and “unauthorized digital music” are used interchangeably. These files should not be mistaken for (or confused with) the legal, protected, authorized digital music files that are currently available online through legitimate outlets (such as Napster-to-Go, Apple's iTunes, RealNetworks’ Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music, MSN Music, EMusic, and Pressplay).

²We thank an anonymous reviewer for directing our attention to this aspect of the neutralization literature.

³Classes were selected by first obtaining a list of the departments and schools within the fifteen university colleges. Three majors within each college were randomly selected so that specific classes within them could be identified. Between one and two lower-level classes and between one and two upper-level classes were randomly selected from the chosen majors using the university's course catalogue. This sampling procedure produced a list of 185 potential classes eligible for survey administration. Correspondence was then sent to the professors of these classes describing the nature of the study and requesting 20 minutes of class time to administer the survey; 16 gave permission. Despite the fact that permission was given in only 16 of 185 classes, a broad range of student majors were found to be represented in those 16 courses due to their interdisciplinary content and because some of the courses were required for all undergraduates to take.

⁴Age was dichotomized because the vast majority of respondents were of traditional college age, and not much additional insight would be gained by measuring piracy participation at each individual level (e.g., age 17, age 18, age 19, age 20).

⁵Individuals with no Internet connection were combined with individuals with only dial-up connections in the reference group due to the fact that both groups have significantly less opportunity to download large amounts of MP3 files compared to those with high-speed connections.

⁶To measure Internet proficiency, the respondent was asked how many of the following he or she had done: “changed my browser's ‘startup’ or ‘home’ page,” “made a purchase online for more than $100,” “participated in an online game,” “participated in an online auction,” “changed my ‘cookie’ preferences,” “participated in an online chat or discussion (not including email, ICQ, or AOL Instant Messenger, or similar instant messaging programs),” “listened to a radio broadcast or music clip online,” “made a telephone call online,” “created a web page,” and “set up my incoming and outgoing mail server preferences.”

⁷Although level of piracy participation is ordinal in nature, tests of the parallel lines assumption revealed that this assumption was violated as the slope coefficients were not found to be parallel across categories. When this is the case, multinomial logistic models are a more appropriate modeling procedure as the parallel line constraint is not assumed (Long 1997).

Reference category is No Participation.

∗p < .05; ∗∗p < .01; ∗∗∗p < .001.

⁸Base values for the independent variables in the models were set at the mean for continuous variables and at 1 (e.g., the attribute of interest) for binary variables.

^† p < .06; ∗p < .05; ∗∗p < .01.

Reference Category is No Participation.

Total Sample (n = 2,032); Approve Sub-sample (n = 1,826); Disapprove Sub-sample (n = 206).

⁹Due to the small number of students who reported disapproving of MP3 downloading yet engaging in high levels of piracy (n = 14), additional steps were taken to determine if the finding was due to idiosyncrasies associated with the responses to the dependent measure. Further descriptive analyses for these individuals revealed that their response to the piracy participation measure was generally consistent with similar questions on the survey measuring piracy participation (e.g., number of songs downloaded in the last week and month and number of total albums downloaded) in the sense that responses also reflected high levels of unauthorized downloading.

∗p < .05 (two-tailed), ∗∗p < .01 (two-tailed).