Moral Judgment and Digital Piracy: Predicting Attitudes, Intention, and Behavior Regarding Digital Piracy Using a Modified Version of the Defining Issues Test

• Main Author: Wang, Jie
• Other Authors: Glover, Rebecca J.
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Texas 2015
• Subjects: Digital piracy; moral judgement; defining issue test; Piracy (Copyright) > Moral and ethical aspects.; Computer crimes > Moral and ethical aspects.; Copyright and electronic data processing > Moral and ethical aspects.
• Online Access: https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc822761/

Digital piracy, the illegal copying or downloading of copyrighted digital products without approval from the copyright holders, has brought great economic loss to the software and digital media industries. Previous studies using moral developmental theory have not found consistent relationships between moral judgment and attitudes towards digital piracy. While some researchers have developed individual test items to assess relationships between moral judgment and attitudes toward digital piracy, others have relied on the Defining Issues Test (DIT). However, in that the DIT represents a general measure of moral judgment based on broad social issues, it, too, may not adequately assess an individual’s reasoning specific to issues regarding digital piracy. The purpose of this study was to create a reliable instrument (i.e., DP-DIT) modeled after the DIT designed to assess moral judgment regarding digital piracy as well as to examine and compare the ability of both DP-DIT and DIT2-short to predict attitudes, intentions and behaviors regarding digital piracy of college students. Results indicated the reliability of both the DIT2-short and the DP-DIT were discounted, quite likely due to the small number of stories contained in each. DP-DIT appeared to have greater predictive ability due to its advantage in predicting attitudes toward digital piracy, especially using DP-DIT MNS. However, even though here DP-DIT MNS was the strongest predictor of attitudes toward digital piracy, it explained a limited amount of variance. Further research to improve reliability and validity of DP-DIT is warranted.