tailieunhanh - The Consumption of Counterfeit Goods: ‘Here be Pirates?’

Social science, policy and popular discourse around counterfeiting regularly position consumers of counterfeit goods as part of a technological elite or motivated by anti- capitalist or anti-corporate positions. In order to explore this construction and highlight its associated limitations, this paper presents quantitative data collected through postal and web-based questionnaires looking at the frequency, location and motivations for the purchase of counterfeit leisure items for consumers in the United Kingdom. The paper suggests the purchase and consumption of counterfeit goods is commonplace across a broader variety of age, gender and socio-economic status categories than often assumed. The study also highlights the. | 1 The Consumption of Counterfeit Goods Here be Pirates Jason Rutter Jo Bryce Cyberspace Research Unit School of Psychology University of Central Lancashire Preston PR1 2HE. UK. Abstract Social science policy and popular discourse around counterfeiting regularly position consumers of counterfeit goods as part of a technological elite or motivated by anticapitalist or anti-corporate positions. In order to explore this construction and highlight its associated limitations this paper presents quantitative data collected through postal and web-based questionnaires looking at the frequency location and motivations for the purchase of counterfeit leisure items for consumers in the United Kingdom. The paper suggests the purchase and consumption of counterfeit goods is commonplace across a broader variety of age gender and socio-economic status categories than often assumed. The study also highlights the value of viewing the consumption of counterfeit goods as social and situated occurring within existing social networks and familiar locations and as closely related to other consumption practices. Keywords Consumers counterfeit goods intellectual property leisure goods software piracy Introduction Counterfeit goods are those which illegally imitate copy or duplicate a good or use a registered trademark without authorisation and therefore infringe upon the legal right to copy of the right s owner. In many working definitions of a counterfeit - especially in relation to currency or pharmaceuticals - the issue of intent to defraud is added but for most cases this is not a defining factor as in the copying of CDs onto writable media . Although counterfeit goods can infringe on patents they are most strongly linked to infringement of copyrighti which in the UK at least is an automatic although transferable right given to the creator of an artistic literary or Paper forthcoming in Sociology 42 6 . 2 typographical work such as a manuscript computer program photograph song sound .