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Ethical Decisions About Sharing Music Files in the P2P Environment

Journal of Business Ethics volume 80, pages 349–365 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

Digitized information and network have made an enormous impact on the music and movie industries. Internet piracy is popular and has greatly threatened the companies in these industries. This study tests Hunt-Vitell’s ethical decision model and attempts to understand why and how people share unauthorized music files with others in the peer-to-peer (P2P) network. The norm of anti-piracy, the ideology of free software, the norm of reciprocity, and the ideology of consumer rights are proposed as four deontological norms related to using P2P systems. The model is tested using a scenario survey with four alternatives; the results indicate that the deontological norm of anti-piracy is not a main factor in affecting P2P users’ ethical considerations regarding sharing files with others. This finding suggests that to protect their property rights, record companies should try to realize the consumer benefits brought via new digital and network technology, instead of simply declaring their intellectual property and resisting the innovations resulting from new technologies.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan, R.O.C. under Grant NSC 92-2416-H-031-005. It received the Dragon Thesis Award from the Acer Foundation, Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, Soochow University, 56 Kuei-Yang St., Sec. 1, Taipei, Taiwan

    Rong-An Shang & Yu-Chen Chen

  2. Product Marketing and Management Department, ZyXEL Communications Corporation, No. 6, Innovation Road II, Science Park, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan

    Pin-Cheng Chen

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  1. Rong-An Shang
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Correspondence to Rong-An Shang.

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Shang, RA., Chen, YC. & Chen, PC. Ethical Decisions About Sharing Music Files in the P2P Environment. J Bus Ethics 80, 349–365 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9424-2

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Keywords

  • peer-to-peer systems
  • ethical decision model
  • computer ethics
  • music industry
  • consumer ethics