ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

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Theory of planned behaviour

The first and most important questions when it comes to music and the Internet are the social aspects, how do people regard downloading both legal and illegal? What do they expect of music over the Internet? The view the consumers have of themselves is important when looking back at how the downloading started. When downloading started, with Napster and Kazaa, everyone was aware that it was illegal. That was also the case with Pirate Bay who’s name tells us that these actions are not acceptable. Even Pirate Bay’s logo (a ship with two bones and a tape) is a logo stolen from the 1980s British campaign to stop home taping of music “Home taping is killing music” .27 So, even though people know that file sharing is illegal they do it anyway. This is partly contributed to how people negotiate with themselves in a various array of social contexts. An example of this can be: driving faster than allowed on the highway. In her dissertation, Sonja Forward writes about people’s different attitudes when it comes to speeding in an urban area and in a more rural area. Even if the respondents consider both scenarios wrong, the level of seriousness and the reasons for doing it shifted.28 I will not try to describe the psychological reasons for why people speed or download music illegally, only describe it as: I know that it’s wrong, but…. So, when people download illegally or break the law in other ways, they tend to construct arguments to show that they are not doing anything wrong. This is central in Theory of Planned behaviour. This is important when we try to understand the underlying reasons for the increasing popularity of illegal downloading as well as the probable future of the connection between law and society. It may be easier for consumers to create reasons for illegal activity when they connote a company or an industry with something bad. When the entertainment industries sue file sharers the general public, who doesn’t have any ties to the industry, turns on the companies, which helps them construct new arguments for not buying music.
But not all file sharers construct arguments to legitimise themselves. Instead, the Swedish Pirate community has very elaborate and sophisticated arguments about file sharing and freedom of the sharing of information. The basic point in the piracy community is: File sharing isn’t wrong, the copyright laws are wrong. What they mean is that the copyright laws are a product of a society that we no longer live in. As far as buying digital music online apparently it is quite popular in some social groups. Itunes has sold more than 4 billion songs since it’s opening in 2003.

Technological determinism

In the paradigm shift in the regulation of digital content, mentioned above in section 3.4.2, there is an assumption closely connected called technological determinism. Technological determinism includes the causal relationship between technological developments and the social impact of this.30 For social evolution, technical innovations are considered to be one of the most important factors. The basic idea of Technological determinism is that technological advances follows a predictable and linear pattern and can be traced backwards in time as well as tracing the social impact it has made.31 It may be said that the advances of technology and society has been one of co evolution. Therefore, technological advances such as the possibility to share files over the Internet also affects peoples views of accessing content and the structure of capitalizing on the new technology.32 The connection between technological and social advances in the context of the Internet follows in the next section, 2.5.2.

Three laws

The assumption of content and network abundance, mentioned above, is based on three laws: Moore’s law, Metcalfe’s law and Gilder’s law. Moore’s law and Gilder’s law are of a technical nature. Moore concludes that computer power will increase dramatically and the price of computer power will decrease at the same rate. Gilder bases say that bandwidth will rise at three times the rate of which processing power increases. The third and final law, Metcalfe’s, explains the growth of the Internet. He concludes that as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows even more. Or in other words, the value of a network is correspondent to the square number of nodes it has.33 Therefore, it is considered valued that a network is global. The global networks imply that networks don’t take consideration to national borders. Governments have to realize that the technological advances will not respect the judiciary that accompanies national borders.
Even democracy on the Internet is biased. All technology has a tendency towards, either centralization or decentralization. The Internet is biased towards decentralization.34 When talking about technological bias gender bias is usually brought to attention. Not least in dealing with the Internet, which is very much a male-dominated arena, especially transparent in file sharing.35 The decentralized nature of the Internet of course affects the way in which its users approach its possibilities, and why national borders have no effect on its use.

The Surveillance society

One of the most known parts of George Orwell’s famous book, 1984, is that Big Brother is watching. In David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard’s book, the Future of music, today’s surveillance society is described. Kusek and Leonhard claims that the surveillance started with the U.S government’s claims of national security with resulted in new laws concerning the surveillance of the citizens.49 Once the national security laws are in place the door is open for big business to impose similar laws but concerning piracy. Lobbyists continuously try to persuade legislators to legalize searches of home computers and to sabotage the computers if illegal files were found.
Kusek and Leonhard continue by pointing towards the increasing amount of video surveillance cameras in public places installed in many countries. Not least is the ease in which companies can create a watertight profile of a person just by looking at a person’s credit card bill. People also use major corporations as e-mail account suppliers and telephone providers, also good ways to track consumers.
The authors claim that all this surveillance can be a powerful weapon if used by corporations and an even scarier weapon if it falls in the wrong hands. According to Kusek and Leonhard people are, well within their right, very concerned about their privacy on the web. For content to be bought and delivered to a large part of the population over the web, a solution to these privacy problems must be found. Creating a service of this type is a tremendous opportunity for new enterprises.
While surveillance can be described as eave dropping it is in this context more a question of state and corporations monitoring the population.
In the wake of 9/11 many businesses in the U.S approached the government with offers to help fight terrorism. They had been refining their products for a long time and could now implement them all over the country together with the government.54. TiVo announced that the 2004 Super bowl faux pas starring Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson was the ‘most replayed moment’ ever. In 2000 it was revealed that previous customers at Amazon were charged higher prices for the same book than a fist time customer.55 The public became aware of the surveillance society that they where in the midst of.

International Law and digital content

In 1886 a convention was entered into forming todays laws on intellectual property. Originally ten states joined, and Sweden joined 1904. First of all the convention proclaims that a person has the same rights in the country in which he/she seeks protections in as its citizens. The Bern convention, which it has become known as, has a high degree of protection and is the foundation of all European countries copyright law. The American copyright laws are not the same because of the American reluctance to ratify the convention.56 In 1998, the EU Data Protection Directive was implemented in the European Union. The main features of this are, (1) an organization must inform the individuals about the purpose of collecting information about them, how to contact the organization and if third parties will take part of the information. (2) The organization must offer the individuals to ‘opt out’. If the information is, what is called, sensitive information, the individuals must be offered to ‘opt in’. (3) Each organization handling personal data, must take appropriate measures to guarantee security and integrity. (4) Individuals must have access to the information in order to change and correct it. (5) Corporations and governments are explicitly forbidden to use the information in another way than the original one, without the permission of the individual. (6) The directive requires that governmental data protection agencies are created. And finally (7) Personal data, concerning EU citizens may only be transferred to countries outside the EU that adopt these rules.57 These seven points concludes that the European Union is hesitant to the notion of data security on the web.
But the hesitation has changed during the last years. In Sweden two new laws exemplify the surveillance society as well as Europe’s less strict data security laws. The first law is the FRA law, which mean that the Swedish government agency FRA, or the defence radio institution, can run intelligence surveillance of Swedish citizens even without a probable cause.58 The second law is the IPRED law, which is formed after a directive form the European Union. IPRED, or Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, involves that a court can rule in favour of a content provider to demand personal information about an IP-number if there is probable cause that he or she has downloaded copyright protected material.
Stefan G. Verhulst writes in the article ”The Regulation of Digital Content” about the ongoing paradigm shift in content regulation. The framework that make up the control of content are coming under more and more scrutiny. This revising has been going on for more than ten years, with all big players on the international arena very much involved such as the EU, the OECD, the U.K, the U.S and so forth.60 It has been shown that the shift is one more of re-regulation than deregulation. However, it does not mean that the shift will not take place, it merely means that the shift will be ‘evolutionary rather that revolutionary’.61 Verhulst means that doing nothing may retard the developments of the market, and shifting too soon may force a decision with not enough information to base it on. The geographical differences between the U.S and the EU, for instance, are very big and may cause problems if the content regulation moves too fast.62 To illustrate the difficulty of regulating across borders, especially with Europe and the U.S., the French-American hate speech laws of 2000 might serve as a good example. The French government attempted to block certain Yahoo! sites where Nazi items where sold which didn’t agree with American free-speech laws of the first amendment.

The Old Economy and New Economy

In the article “Creative economy” By Terry Flew the old economy before the Internet, is put side by side to the new economy, which is focused around the Internet, in a comparison.64 In this comparison he concludes that the Market for the new economy is Dynamic, Global and organized by networks. There are no hierarchy per se, this can be seen all over the Pirate community. The business is circled around innovation and knowledge over the old economy’s mass production and cost efficiency. Because of the new economy’s high demands for innovation and adaptation the changes within the economy are swift and rapid.
Flew continues to explain his comparison. The old economy is based on buyers and seller consciously exchanging currency where as the new economy is based on the relationship between suppliers and users. This also means that the old economy is based on material assets but based on intangible assets in the new economy. These intangible assets include ideas, brand identities, patents, copyrights, or to use one word, intellectual property. Since the products that are sold are non-material there is really no aspiration for consumers to own the products, instead it is the access of the products that are interesting.66 These aspects are even more interesting when connected to culture. The new economy might be said to be a cultural capitalism, which uses the new means of communication and the commerce of culture.67 This requires a change in the way we see culture. As we look at culture, ‘the way of life’, the aesthetic tradition and the industrial part of it, we find that culture can add value to the economy and therefore be used in a much wider sense. Preserving culture, like in museums, is an old way of looking at culture, instead, the realms of culture should be expanded into all areas of the economy and society.68 Martin Lister points out that new media has greatly increased the possibility to take part in the media, this what Lister describes as interactivity.69 This is also a great part of the new economy.
There is apparently really no reason for consumers to own content in the New Economy. Scholars Schläffer & Arnold suggests that in order for companies and products to succeed in the new Economy is to make consumers like and place value in their products, if this is achieved consumers might still purchase a product in order to own it.70 Anders Edström-Frejman has suggested a model for how consumers argue when purchasing musical content. Three cornerstones are of importance: price, diversification and control.

The Pirate community

In order to understand digital piracy and the impact it has had on the entertainment industry, the Swedish Pirates were probably the most well planned and articulated organization of them all. The Pirate community in Sweden is a very non-rigid composition. There are really no leaders, only the ones that have grown to be advocates of the movement. The fight between pirates and anti-pirates is both judiciary and ideological. One side of the movement is the political Piratpartiet, which tries to affect politics by joining in. The other side of the movement is the revolutionary The Pirate Bay. There is really not any formal connection between TPB and Piratpartiet but the engaged file sharers are only so many. The view that holds them together is: information over the Internet should be free, and; there is nothing wrong with file sharing, the copyright laws are wrong. What started the Piracy movement was an Internet forum called Piratbyrån. Piratbyrån wasn’t more than a forum but was one of the first were the debate over copyright laws were presented for real.

Table of contents :

1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 PURPOSE / AIM
1.1.1 Problem
1.2 DELIMITATION
1.3 DISPOSITION
2. THEORY
2.1 SCENARIOS
2.2 SOCIAL THEORY
2.2.1 Theory of planned behaviour
2.3 TECHNICAL THEORY
2.3.1 Technological determinism
2.3.2 Three laws
2.3.3 Distribution
2.4 POLITICAL THEORY
2.4.1 The Surveillance society
2.4.2 International Law and digital content
2.5 ECONOMICAL THEORY
2.5.1 The Old Economy and New Economy
2.5.2 Value chains?
3 FACTORS
3.1 SOCIAL FACTORS
3.1.1 The Ubiquity of Water
3.1.2 The Pirate community
The Pirate Bay
Piratpartiet
3.1.3 Conclusion of Social factors
3.2 TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS
3.2.1 History of technology
3.2.2 Wireless society or Mobile society
3.2.3 Distribution of content
3.2.4 Antipiracy
3.3 POLITICAL FACTORS
3.3.1 Swedish politics in the 1990’s
3.3.2 International law and IPRED
3.3.3 The Pirate Bay lawsuit / Lawsuits
3.4 ECONOMICAL FACTORS
3.4.1 Value of music
3.4.2 Advertisements
3.5 ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
3.5.1 The Global world
3.5.2 Internet and Globalizing
4 METHOD
4.1 SELECTION
4.2 COLLECTION OF DATA
4.2.1 Validity
4.2.2 Reliability
4.2.3 Critique
4.3 SCENARIOS
5 RESULTS
GENERAL RESULTS
5.1 SCENARIO 1 (THE FREE SOCIETY)
5.1.1 Social
5.1.2 Technical
5.1.3 Politics
5.1.4 Economy
5.1.5 Environment
Summary
5.2.1 Social
5.2.2 Technical
5.2.3 Politics
5.2.4 Economy
5.3.1 Social
5.3.2 Technical
5.3.3 Politics
5.3.4 Economy
5.3.5 Environment
6 CONCLUSION
7 DISCUSSION
8. LITTERATURE AND SOURCES
8.1 BOOKS AND ARTICLES
8.2 PRESS
8.3 MAGAZINES
8.4 OTHER
8.5 INTERNET
8.6 INTERVIEW
ENCLOSURES

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