Between Legality and Legitimacy: Behavioral Insights into Digital Piracy and Regulatory Disobedience
In the past few decades, the exponential growth of digital goods has overwhelmingly reshaped the landscape of cultural production, access, and distribution, creating new challenges in terms of legality, legitimacy, and accessibility. One prominent issue that has emerged is digital piracy, a practice that continues to gain ground worldwide. While often considered a violation of intellectual property rights, it remains widespread, with segments of society viewing it as morally acceptable, thus highlighting a gap between legal standards and public moral perception. This disconnect has prompted a growing debate on how digital piracy should be regulated, particularly when traditional legal mechanisms seem ineffective in addressing the underlying causes of this phenomenon. This article aims to develop a comprehensive framework that views digital piracy not merely as an infringement of law, but as a multifaceted social issue, incorporating moral, cognitive, distributive, and participatory governance dimensions. It also proposes a paradigmatic shift from punitive approaches to more equitable, inclusive regulatory strategies. Our findings show that punitive legal models fail to account for the social, moral, and psychological factors instigating piracy. Instead, piracy is often framed as a form of resistance against perceived injustice and exclusion from cultural goods. This article concludes that addressing digital piracy in a more meaningful way requires a more nuanced regulatory approach, combining incentives, participatory governance, and distributive justice to create a fairer and more ethical framework for managing piracy in the digital era.
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