Piracy in the digital age: Is ethical awareness turning into action?

The past few decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the volume and intensity of socio- economic and ethical consequences of misuse of information technology. The internet era and the development of new technologies for P2P sharing have led to new opportunities for ethical breaches like digital piracy. Digital piracy, also known as soft-lifting, remains a big concern of today even after attempting to solve it through several different approaches like creating awareness, using technological means or through implementing code of ethics . In light of the rapidly increasing digital piracy, this study aims at exploring the relations between ethical awareness and the actual behaviors of individuals in real life situations. This study has used ethical scenarios as a way of understanding the ethical awareness of individuals. Real life scenarios involve actual loss of money and time and hence individuals need not respond the same way as they do in surveys. Hence it will be interesting to study the real-world behaviors with actual gains or losses. The first part of the study analyses the state of corporate code of ethics in 29 organizations and the ethical awareness of employees. The results indicate that even though corporate code of ethics play a role in ensuring an ethical computing environment, enforcing policies has its own limitations. The second part of the study focuses on real-world behaviors of individuals related to digital piracy by analyzing their internet activities. In this, the ethical awareness of a total of 110 students regarding digital piracy is compared with their internet behaviors obtained from their weblogs and the statistical results are reported. The results show that even though the students are aware that unauthenticated downloading of copyrighted contents is unethical, this awareness is not preventing them from attempting to download such contents. The results of the study indicate that merely having a code of conduct or ethical awareness- is not enough to deter users from committing unethical actions related to information technology. Institutional compliance and technological means can help in preventing people from unethical behavior only to a limited extent. The results imply that there is a growing need for ethical empowerment of individuals, to enable them to practice ethics without any external control.