Copyright, schmopyright

The file sharing police is doomed to lose against a generation of smug pirates. This is what Swedish research group Cybernorms concludes with after measuring social norms in the file sharing community. The researchers found that 75 percent of 15 – 25 year olds feel no remorse for downloading pirate material from sites like the Pirate Bay, which euphemized its image by calling themselves The Research Bay during the research. They concluded that there are currently “no social norms that hinder illegal file sharing”.

The lack of norms could very well reflect generational differences as younger people have grown up in an open source era where the idea that sharing and modifying available content is a good, democratizing force which illegal downloading simply is a part of.

Source: Ars Technica