SOCIAL NORMS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY. Online norms and the European legal development

Abstract:
This report is the result of study that was performed in January and February 2009. It was presented and reviewed at the Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association: Law, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century in May 2009.

The study empirically examined, or rather examined the lack of, social norms opposing illegal file sharing. A total of over 1,000 respondents have answered the questionnaire. Along with the social norm indicators, the study maps out relevant questions regarding internet behaviour in this field, such as the will to use anonymity services and the will to pay for copyrighted content. These results are compared and contrasted with the legal development trend in European law in internet and file sharing related matters, as well as the Swedish implementation of this development, as a member of the European Union. This includes the Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive (IPRED), the Directive on Data retention as well as the implementation of INFOSOC.

Svensson and Larsson in Social Norms and Intellectual Property – Online norms and the European legal development consequently portrays the social norms on the one hand and the legal development on the other, and the overarching question of the report therefore addresses the correlation of these two. Do the social norms amongst 15-25 year olds match the legal regulation, as well as the regulatory trend on this field? If not, how can this be understood or explained? The study shows that the cybernorms differ, both in inherent structures and origin, from current legal constructions.

This study is part of Cybernorms – norm creation processes in young net cultures, a research project that explores the norm creating processes (social and legal) that appear in the wake of the changing information technology. The project is run by researchers at the Department of Sociology of Law at Lund University and is funded by The Knowledge Foundation (Stiftelsen för kunskaps- och kompetensutveckling). The members of the project run a scientific blog at www.cybernormer.se.