Determined to break the plundering habits of these misguided souls, the US movie and recording industries have continuously meddled in the country, lobbying for tougher responses to file-sharing.

The results have been notable, not least the implementation of IPRED and the Data Retention Directive plus numerous prosecutions of file-sharing site operators and their users. But do tougher laws actually encourage people “to do the right thing” or even change their perception of what that thing is?

According to new findings from the Cybernorms research project at Lund University, the introduction of aggressive legislation has done little to reduce levels of file-sharing carried out by young people.

“In Sweden we saw a moderate drop in file sharing in 2009 when IPRED was implemented. Since then it has remained at approximately 60 percent among 15-25 year old people,” researcher Marcin de Kaminski told TorrentFreak.

“Our conclusion is that repressive actions that lack societal support may still have effects, but that the effects are limited.”

The problem for the copyright industries is that while they’ve been very effective in lobbying for more legal restrictions, they have failed to make ground in matching those frameworks with what people consider to be acceptable behavior.

“As a part of our research regarding cybernorms we try to understand and
describe informal social control,” says Kaminski.

“Our results show that young people feel no pressure from neighbors, friends, relatives, teachers etc. to refrain from file sharing. A higher degree of pressure or social control would most possibly have a clear impact on habits and practices regarding file sharing.”

Essentially, file-sharers do not believe they are doing anything wrong and while this remains the case the ‘problem’ is unlikely to go away. Kaminski told us that the research shows a slight increase in young people who file share on a daily basis, from 18% in September 2009 to 20% in January 2012. Additionally, more file-sharers are turning to anonymity services to hide their activities.

“File sharing is an interesting case illustrating the fact that repressive sanctions alone might have some effects on illegal practices, but that the effects first and foremost seem to be limited and secondly might be for the wrong reasons.

“Without support for repressive efforts in social norms the effects tend to result in a feeling of increased risk or danger – rather than [the activity being repressed] actually being considered wrong,” Kaminski concludes.

That said, tougher laws don’t leave file-sharers entirely untouched. But instead of stopping their behavior, they take measures to hide it. Previously, researchers from the Cyber Norms found that when compared to figures from late 2009, 40% more 15 to 25-year-olds are now hiding their activities online through VPN services.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The above is just one of the many examples which show that there are many positive sides to the act of ‘copying’. Despite these nuances, piracy is often referred to as theft. This is a problem according to Stefan Larsson, lawyer and socio-legal researcher at Lund University in Sweden.

Larsson addresses the issue in his thesis “Metaphors and Norms – Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society,” for which he just received his doctorate. Talking to TorrentFreak, he explains why copyright infringement isn’t theft, and how this problematic metaphor keeps the gap between public norms and the law intact.

“The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied. There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike,” Larsson explains.

One of the obvious problems is that it suggests that every “stolen copy” is a lost sale.

“Following this conception, some iPods could be valued at millions of dollars and a file sharing service could aid in copyright infringements representing more value than the Gross Domestic Product of entire countries,” Larsson says.

And indeed, if we look at the court case against The Pirate Bay in Sweden, the renumeration model of the entertainment industry would mistakenly put the “value” of the site at billions of dollars.

“I think that one important aspect lies in that the legal regulation is built on fundamentally different conceptions of reality,” Larsson told TorrentFreak.

The researcher explains that the public perception of the law, or social norms, is out of line with what the law actually says. In part this is because the “theft” metaphor is built into law, while there is no such thing as theft where piracy is concerned.

“In other words, this means that legal concepts can become metaphorical if their meaning expands into new areas, and the fixed conceptions that once ensured their legitimacy may seem unjust in the eyes of a reality that has moved on. This supports the gap between legal and social norms regarding parts of copyright today.”

This gap between the law and what people see, feel and experience in real life is a problem, one that lawmakers are now trying to address with even more draconian laws based on the same nonsense metaphors.

But are tougher laws the best solution? Will these change people’s norms? Larsson is not convinced.

“There are naturally many examples of when tougher laws change behavior, and there are also even examples of when tougher laws have made a substantial contribution in changing social norms. However, there are a few possible drawbacks when law turns repressive.”

He explains that these laws “would need to make everyone think differently about reality,” something that’s easier said than done. Another problem according to Larsson is that may people will simply find ways to hide what they do, such as using VPN services or proxies when downloading via BitTorrent.

Larsson doesn’t think that the current trends of stronger copyright laws and more surveillance of Internet users is the right path to take. These measures often violate the rights of the masses to benefit the interests of a few, which can never be a good solution.

Instead of changing people’s norms and twisting reality, perhaps society might be better off when copyright law adapts to the digital age?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Cybernorms group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators draft more sensible laws.

In just a few days 75,000 people responded and TorrentFreak was given the opportunity to share some results on the topic of anonymity. The respondents were asked whether they use services to make their BitTorrent downloads anonymous, or whether they were interested in using such services.

The results of the survey reveal that nearly 70 percent of The Pirate Bay users utilize a VPN or proxy, or are interested in doing so in the future. Of this group 4.8 percent already use a paid service, while 13 percent use a free solution. Another 51.5 percent do not use an anonymizer service, but are interested in doing so in the future.

Only 18.4 percent of the respondents said they were not interested in appearing anonymous online, and the remaining 12.4 percent weren’t familiar with terms like VPN, or were undecided about their usefulness.

Looking at some of the regional differences a few interesting patterns appear.

Pirate Bay users from North America and Africa are most anonymous, 22.6 and 21.2 percent respectively. Within North America there are some striking differences as well. Only 14.7 percent of the Canadians use BitTorrent anonymously, versus 24.7 percent in Central U.S.

Within Europe there’s a great variation between the use of free and paid anonymizer services. In Russia free services (11.2%) are favored over paid services (1.9%), but in Northern Europe Pirate Bay users are more likely to use a paid (8.2%) than a free (7.7%) service.

The largest group that say they do not care about anonymity online can be found in Central and South America, with 27.8 percent. This group is the smallest in the U.S. and Oceania with 14.7 and 15.6 percent respectively.

Finally, we see that the more often people upload files themselves, the more likely they are to do so anonymously. Nearly a third of the Pirate Bay users who upload files nearly every day use an anonymizer service, versus 14 percent of the people who never upload files at all.

Overall, the results of the survey show that the vast majority of The Pirate Bay users do value anonymity, but that many of these users are currently not downloading and sharing anonymously. However, this could change at any time.

“We interpret this as a type of readiness by quite a lot of people in the file-sharing community to become more anonymous. This could happen when the risk of getting caught would increase or perceived as a more significant threat,”Stefan Larsson, co-founder and researcher at the Cybernorms research group told TorrentFreak.

There is definitely a large number of potential clients out there for proxy and VPN services, and with the increase of lawsuits and three-strikes policies this group may become even larger.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The world’s largest BitTorrent site has teamed up with the Cybernorms research group at Lund University and is encouraging its users to take a sociological survey on file-sharing related matters.

The group researches how the Internet creates new social norms in society, and to what extent these norms are or should be reflected in relevant legislation. Ultimately, the researchers hope the collated knowledge and insights will help legislators to draft more sensible laws. Needless to say, this is a topic that The Pirate Bay takes to heart.

“The Pirate Bay undertakes this study in cooperation with the research group Cybernorms at the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University in Sweden. Completing this short survey will take only a few minutes of your time, after which you will be redirected to The Pirate Bay,” the introduction of the survey reads.

“Understanding online norms and values is essential to developing relevant and effective laws and policies. The purpose of this survey is to help researchers to better understand habits and norms within the file-sharing community. With your help, we hope to create a knowledge base that will influence new laws and law enforcement related to the internet,” it adds.

The survey itself is pretty straightforward and can literally be answered in under a minute. Due to the nature of the topic, all data will be kept strictly confidential and no personally identifiable information such as IP-addresses will be stored.

TorrentFreak got in touch with Cybernorms head of research Måns Svensson to find out more about the project and the purpose of the project.

“In this survey that we are conducting together with The Pirate Bay we are collecting data that will give us information about file sharing around the world,” he told us.

“We know that recent developments in terms of law and law enforcement in Sweden have weak support in the social norms of society. By conducting a global study among file sharers we will be able to get new information on the situation in other parts of the world.”

“In a broader sense we want to follow and study the social norms that are emerging as a result of new technology and law’s ability to respond to the changes. Our hope is that better knowledge in this area will lead to a more sensible legal development,” Svensson added.

Marcin De Kaminski, PhD candidate in Sociology of Law at Lund University and researcher at the Cybernorms group told TorrentFreak that The Pirate Bay has been a partner from the start but that this is the first time the site’s users are being asked to participate.

“The Pirate Bay is still one of the top hundred largest sites on the Internet. As a researcher, it is a great opportunity to be able to base your work upon this. Especially when you’re trying to target a community which sometimes is hard to grasp,” De Kaminski said.

The Cybernorms group officially started in 2009 and previously made the news when it found that millions of Swedes started to hide their online identity in response to tougher anti-piracy legislation. At the time the researchers found that 10 percent of all Swedes between the age 15 and 25 were taking measures to protect themselves against the increasing online surveillance.

The new survey in collaboration with The Pirate Bay is truly the first of its kind. Although many academics and commercial research outfits have looked into the file-sharing issue, to date, none of them has reached out to such a massive group of BitTorrent users. We encourage all our readers who’ve occasionally shared a file to take part, and we’ll report on the results as soon as they come in.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.