from Wired, 2003. By John Perry Barlow.
“A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)”
from the NYT, 1 Oct 2007.
One moment, Alison Chang, a 15-year-old student from Dallas, is cheerfully goofing around at a local church-sponsored car wash, posing with a friend for a photo. Weeks later, that photo is posted online and catches the eye of an ad agency in Australia, and Alison appears on a billboard in Adelaide as part of a Virgin Mobile advertising campaign.
"Software piracy is a damaging and important moral issue, which is widely believed to be unchecked in particular areas of the globe. This cross-cultural study examines differences in morality and behavior toward software piracy in Singapore versus the United States, and reviews the cultural histories of Asia versus the United States to explore why these differences occur. The paper is based upon pilot data collected in the U.S. and Singapore, using a tradeoff analysis methodology and analysis. The data reveal some fascinating interactions between the level of ethical transgression and the rewards or consequences which they produce."
—
Swinyard, W.R., Rinne, H. & Keng Kau, A. (1990). The morality of software piracy: A cross-cultural analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, 9(8): 655-664.
[abstract only]
This is, I’m sure, a very interesting article looking at the cross-cultural conceptualisations of ownership. Unfortunately it’s behind a firewall.
Notable: it’s from 1990 - very early!
"How do we determine who owns what? This article reports evidence indicating that we typically assume that the first person who possesses an object is its owner. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read cartoons in which two children each take a turn playing with a toy. Participants selected the character who first possessed the toy when judging who owned it, but not when judging which character liked it more. In Experiment 3, participants read stories based on the Pierson v. Post (1805) property law case. In line with the appellate court’s ruling in that case, participants selected the character who first captured and possessed an animal as its owner over another character who had pursued it earlier. Together, these findings provide evidence for an assumption that specifically guides our reasoning about ownership and that may lead everyday intuitions about property to be generally consistent with property law."
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Friedman, O. (2008). First possession: An assumption guiding information about who owns what. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(2): 290-295.
[full text pdf]
A nice cross-historical account of psychological ownership relevant to a legal framework.
"…social utility was the most important motivation for illegal downloading. Looking at music piracy as a social phenomenon may be a key to improving the effectiveness of antipiracy strategies."
—
Sheehan, B, Tsao, J. & Yang, S. (2011). Motivations for Gratifications of Digital Music Piracy Among College Students. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 18: 241-258.
[full text pdf]
"The article reports findings of a study conducted to explore the cognitive moral logics used for considering software piracy as ethical or unethical … an overall analysis revealed that the respondents mostly used moral justification (neutralization) for not considering software piracy unethical whereas those considering it unethical used normative (principled) logics."
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Bhal, K.T & Leekha, N.D. (2007). Exploring Cognitive Moral Logics Using Grounded Theory: The Case of Software Piracy Journal of Business Ethics, 81(3): 635-646.
[abstract only]
Cummings, A.S. (2010, Dec). From Monopoly to Intellectual Property: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, 1909-1971, The Journal od American History, 659-681.
Comprehensive long-view analysis of the historical construction of ownership in the US around music in the pre-Web era.
from The Economist (8 Dec 2005)
The Asheron’s Call 2 closure debacle & the real-world effect on its players.
"In general, only 21 percent of respondents produced some type of online content daily or weekly, 31 percent produced content on a monthly basis or less, and 45 percent said they had never produced any. These low numbers are not very surprising, as previous studies have shown that user-generated content online is produced by a relatively small group."
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Dutta, S. Dutton, W. & Law, G. (2011, Apr). The New Internet World: A global perspective on freedom of expression, privacy, trust and security online. INSEAD Working Paper 2011/89/TOM.
http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=48408
Their definition of “online content production” included:
- update or create a profile on a social networking site;
- post pictures or photos on the Internet;
- post messages on discussion forums or message boards;
- use a distribution list for e-mail’
- write a blog;
- maintain a personal website;
- post a podcast; and
- post a video blog
What I find to be the most fascinating element of this observation was the country breakdown: China produced the most (45%), followed by Brazil (35%) and India (32%). The US (12%), Canada (12%), the UK (8%), Australia and New Zealand (7% combined) produced the least.
Also interesting is how the diffusion of Internet connectivity/use affects content production: those countries with the greatest penetration create the least.
There’s plenty more interesting information to be found in this report. Here’s the abstract:
Worldwide diffusion of the Internet is focusing debate around values and attitudes that are likely to vary across cultures, particularly around online freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security. These are prominent topics of discussion amongst leading Internet stakeholders, such as private and public sector members, governments, policymakers, and the media. However, we know relatively little about the opinions of users around the world. How do users see these issues, and how do they experience the impact of the Internet in these areas?
This study reports the results of a survey of over 5,400 adult Internet users from 13 different countries. The online survey was conducted by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and INSEAD, in collaboration with comScore. It was designed to better understand cross-cultural differences in user behaviour and attitudes, focusing on the core Internet values of freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security.
Findings from this study show that a global Internet culture has emerged as users across countries often share similar viewpoints and habits related to these vital matters pertaining to the Internet. Users worldwide generally support and desire the core Internet values, without signalling a willingness for tradeoffs among these potentially conflicting values and priorities. However, users in nations that are more recently embracing the Internet, who are becoming the dominant online population, express even greater support for the most basic value underpinning the Internet – freedom of expression. In addition, these users also outpace users in older-adopting nations in their innovative uses of the Internet. We conclude that a new Internet world is emerging which may lead to many shifts in the Internet’s global centre of gravity – shifts that will have major implications for the future of the Internet.
Key Findings: (1.) There is a global culture developing around the Internet, in which users worldwide share similar values and attitudes related to online freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security. (2.) The newly emerging nations online, primarily in the developing regions of Asia and Latin and South America, are becoming the dominant nations online, having the greatest number of users, despite lower levels of adoption. (3.) Users want it all: they desire freedom of expression, privacy, trust, and security without viewing these as mutually exclusive. (4.) Newly adopting countries are more liberal in attitudes, such as support for freedom of expression, and behaviours, such as use of social networking platforms, while older-adopting countries are more conservative, tied to more traditional Internet applications and content. These findings point to the beginning of a new Internet world in which the developing nations move into a leading role in shaping the use and governance of this global network of networks.
Pierce, J.L., Kostova, T. & Dirks, K.Y. (2003, Mar). The state of psychological ownership: integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, Vol 7(1): 84-107
(full text)
This article attempts to integrate an enormous body of research throughout history, including social psychology, child development, consumer behaviour, cross-cultural psychology, sociology and demography and workplace psychology. A mean feat.
Here are a few choice quotes:
Etzioni writes that ownership is a “dual creation, part attitude, part object, part in the mind, part ‘real’” (1991: 466)
On the particular context of “ownership”:
There is diverse literature that suggests that the psychology of possession is well rooted in people socialized by a Western heritage.
emphasis added
There are notions of “possessions as part of the extended self”:
Mann writes, “What I own feels like a part of me” (1991: 211). Sartre (1943/1969), in his treatise on “being and nothingness,” notes that “to have” (along with “to do” and “to be”) is one of the three categories of human existence and that “the totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being … I am what I have … What is mine is myself” (p. 591-592).
On ownership of non-physical objects:
While ownership is generally experienced as involving person-object relations, it can also be felt toward non-physical entities such as ideas, words, artistic creations, and other people. Isaacs (1933), for example, observed feelings of ownership among children towards nursery rhymes and songs —they were ‘theirs’ if they heard them first and no one else had a right to sing or hear them without their permission.
They outline three senses of ownership in their definition:
Psychological ownership answers the question –“What do I feel is mine?” and its conceptual core is a sense of possession (Wilpert, 1991) towards a particular target (e.g., the products of one’s labor, toys, home, land, significant others). Second, psychological ownership reflects a relationship between an individual and an object (material or immaterial in nature) in which the object is experienced as having a close connection with the self.
Third, the state of psychological ownership (i.e., mine-ness and/or our-ness)… is a condition, of which one is aware through intellectual perception. It reflects an individual’s awareness, thoughts, and beliefs regarding the target of ownership. This cognitive state, however, is coupled with an emotional or affective sensation. Feelings of ownership are said to be pleasure producing per se
emphasis added.
They distinguish between psychological and legal ownership (although admit that they are possibly related):
legal ownership is recognized foremost by society, and hence the rights that come with ownership are specified and protected by the legal system. In contrast, psychological ownership is recognized foremost by the individual who holds this feeling. Consequently, it is the individual who manifests the felt rights associated with psychological ownership.
Furthermore, psychological ownership can exist in the absence of legal ownership, as noted by Furby (1980), Isaacs (1933), and Etzioni (1991), among others. Finally, people can legally own an object (e.g., automobile, home), yet never claim the possession as their own -“it never seems to belong to me” (McCracken, 1986: 79). According to McCracken (1986), under these conditions the individual simply fails to claim the object as ‘theirs’ because they do not find personal meaning in the object’s symbolic properties, a necessary precondition for the experience and claiming something as ‘mine’.
Interestingly, their list of “satisfactions” attributed to ownership reflects the research covered in last week’s column, “home”:
Porteous (1976) offered that there are three satisfactions which derive from ownership: (1) control over space per se; (2) personalization of space as an assertion of identity; and, (3) stimulation (achieved, for example, by thinking about, using, improving, or defending one’s possessions/territory). It has also been argued (e.g., Ardrey, 1966; Duncan, 1981; Porteous, 1976; Weil, 1952) that possessions help create ‘a place,’ symbolically captured by the concept of ‘home,’ and its capacity to provide the individual with a context in which to dwell, a sense of psychic comfort, pleasure and security (cf. Dreyfus, 1991; Heidegger, 1967; Steiner, 1978).
There are two camps in the origins of ownership debate which divide roughly into the “nature” vs “nurture” debate: the biological faction argue that we have an innate need for possession driven by our requirements for security, food and reproduction (evidence: animal ownership practices), whereas the social faction propose that it’s a phenomenon learned at an early age to do with control (evidence: different cultural constructions/conceptions of ownership).
They consider exclusiveness:
people have an inherent drive to gain and to defend an exclusive property. For Darling (1937, 1939), territory is in essence a psychological expression
Part of this has to do with the way that a sense of ownership emerges, which they suggest are:
controlling the ownership target (object), coming to know the target intimately, and investing the self into the target
in more detail:
the greater the amount of control a person can exercise over certain objects, the more they will be psychologically experienced as part of the self
…
psychological ownership reflects an intimate relationship or a psychological proximity of the owner to the owned
…
Sartre (1943) even suggested that buying an object was simply another form of creating an object as it too stems from the fruits of our labor. Thus, that which stems from our labor, be it our work or the widget that we make, much like our words, thoughts, and emotions are representations of the self. The most obvious and perhaps the most powerful means by which an individual invests him/herself into an object is to create it. Creation involves investing time, energy, and even one’s values and identity. “Things” are attached to the person who created them because they are his/her product, they derive their being and form from his/her efforts; hence, the individual who has created them owns them in much the same way as he/she owns him/herself (Durkheim, 1957).
On the (important) role of culture in psychological ownership:
psychological ownership is very tightly linked to the concept of self and the concept of self, in turn, is in part socially prescribed and affected by culture (cf. Erez & Early, 1993)… psychological ownership is partly ‘learned’ through socialization practices, which again are culturally determined.
…
Thus, culture is an important condition that needs to be examined to better understand the phenomenon of psychological ownership. Reflected in traditions, customs, norms, mores and beliefs in a society, culture shapes the individual’s self-concept and values with regard to control, self-identity, self-expression, ownership, and property.
emphasis added
So much more in this article. A great overview.
