ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses digital piracy, defined as a consumer practice of illegally downloading files, such as music, movies, software, from the Internet. It briefly reviews the existing theoretical foundations and explores the role of culture in digital piracy behavior. The chapter sets out the research objective and provides a conceptual framework of the study. It presents theoretically grounded research hypotheses and also discusses methodological procedures. The chapter also provides the analytical procedures and research findings along with implications and limitations. One conceptual framework that may help to explain the varying degree of digital piracy across individuals and countries is culture. Culture provides powerful but often overlooked behavior guidelines to consumers and its influence is well-documented. In the model, digital piracy behavior is conceptualized as the consumers' recent engagement in digital piracy-related activities, and rationalization as the consumers' use of techniques to counter feelings of guilt associated with their piracy activities before and after the actual digital piracy behavior.
