ABSTRACT
This chapter provides results from five different studies, all conducted by scholars active within Cybernorms. Cybernorms is a research group founded by sociologists of law with a specific focus on exploring social and legal norm structures that appear in the wake of technological and social change. The fact that the debate concerning copyright in a digital society has been both intense and filled with polemic conflicts ever since the late 1990s makes it clear that it is a most complicated issue to solve, or even grasp. Based on the underlying understanding that the digitalization of society is producing a growing divide between legal and social norms, the Cybernorms research aims to identify and analyse norm-related conflicts between law and common online practices. The case of illegal file-sharing on the Internet is utilized to illustrate and examine different aspects of socio-legal consequences due to digitalization of society.
