Friday 29 March 2013

If you are intending on pirating season 3 of Game of Thrones...

 ... it's 36% likely that you will.

Well, that 36% comes from your intention, anyway. There's a whole host of factors out of reach from researchers' predictions.

As confused as Khaleesi when she lost her dragon eggs? Read on...

A recent article which you can access here neatly ties together two (inter-related) recurring themes in the short history of this blog:

(Healthy) skepticism over self-report methodology

and

The difficulties in actually measuring  piracy

Taylor (2012), who has written extensively on digital piracy, firstly explains how: 'the predictive validity of behavioural intentions on subsequent behaviors is not absolute and varies across domains of inquiry' (p. 472). He then goes on to demonstrate a novel way of unobtrusively measuring participants' file-sharing activity - whilst retaining participants' anonymity.

The result? Taylor shows that intention to pirate does indeed predict actual frequency of piracy behaviours, suggesting that intention accounts for some 36% of observed file-sharing behaviours - slightly higher than previous analysis suggests.


Whilst the methodology (click the link and read 'C. Measuring digital piracy behavior') introduces new limitations, by the authors own admission, it does reveal that innovative ways to measure actual piracy behaviour exist. Ethically questionable, it also shows such approaches are a time-consuming pain-in-the-ass.

Ultimately (and perhaps ironically?) Taylor's (2012) research will live to serve future research employing self-report methodology; now resting upon these findings to justify the approach.

Tweets @musicpiracyblog where I have finally figured out how (but perhaps not when) to use hashtags..

References

Taylor, S.A. (2012). Evaluating digital piracy intentions on Behaviors. Journal of Services Marketing, 26(7) 472-483.


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