Graf-Vlachy, Goyal, Ouardi and König (2021)
Contents
Source Details
| Graf-Vlachy, Goyal, Ouardi and König (2021) | |
| Title: | The politics of piracy: political ideology and the usage of pirated online media |
| Author(s): | Graf-Vlachy, L., Goyal, T., Ouardi, Y., König, A. |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Citation: | Graf-Vlachy, L., Goyal, T., Ouardi, Y., König, A. (2022). The politics of piracy: political ideology and the usage of pirated online media. Inf Technol Manag 23, 51–63. |
| Link(s): | Definitive , Open Access |
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| About the Data | |
| Data Description: | The authors collected as a sample clickstream data from 3873 individuals in the US. Moreover, they approximated the political ideology of those individuals “calculating a weighted average conservative share of the online news outlets they visited in the six-month observation period”. In addition, they measured the use of pirated online streaming and file sharing websites through two binary variables that indicate whether one of the individuals has visited any of such websites during the observation period. |
| Data Type: | Primary data |
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| Cross Country Study?: | No |
| Comparative Study?: | No |
| Literature review?: | No |
| Government or policy study?: | No |
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Abstract
“There is a lack of clarity in information systems research on which factors lead people to use or not use technologies of varying degrees of perceived legality. To address this gap, we use arguments from the information systems and political ideology literatures to theorize on the influence of individuals’ political ideologies on online media piracy. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals with a more conservative ideology, and thus lower openness to experience and higher conscientiousness, generally engage in less online media piracy. We further hypothesize that this effect is stronger for online piracy technology that is legally ambiguous. Using clickstream data from 3873 individuals in the U.S., we find that this effect in fact exists only for online media piracy technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous. Specifically, more conservative individuals, who typically have lower ambiguity intolerance, use (legal but ambiguously perceived) pirated streaming websites less, while there is no difference for the (clearly illegal) use of pirated file sharing websites”.
Main Results of the Study
Authors contend that engagement with online media piracy depends on the political ideology of each individual: people with a more conservative ideology engage less with pirated content than more liberal individuals. The reason is that conservative individuals are less inclined to tolerate and deal with the ambiguity of online media piracy than liberal individuals. Therefore, the concept of “ambiguity intolerance” makes conservative individuals avoid pirated online streaming. However, no difference in ideology is found when it comes to pirated file sharing, because the legal status in that context is unambiguous and so conservatives and liberals behave in basically the same way. In a more general way, authors believe that conservative individuals are less inclined to engage with new uses of technology that are considered ambiguous, whereas there should be no difference between liberals and conservatives when use of a technology is unambiguous.
Policy Implications as Stated By Author
Coverage of Study
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