Cinema staff are being incentivised with cash rewards in the fight against theatrical piracy. Thirteen ushers from across the UK have already been given sums of up to £700, adding up to a sum of thousands of pounds, as rewards for identifying potential pirates at screenings of Skyfall, Ted, The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit.

The initiative is funded by UK film distributors via the Film Distributors' Association and has been running since 2006.

This article examines the scholarly literature pertaining to music, film and software piracy around the world, with special attention to data sources, research scope and general findings. The article finds that the conspicuous absence of methodologies utilizing critical theory in this broad literature has constricted the world view of piracy, resulting in monolithic explanations of the causes and correlates of piracy. It further identifies systematic biases relating to the unjustified use of data published by the industry watchdog Business Software Alliance

Soft lifting refers to the process whereby a legally licensed software program is installed or copied in violation of its licensing agreement. Previous research on this pervasive kind of unethical computer use has mainly focused on the determinants of this unethical act, which are rooted in personal, economic, technological, cultural, socio-political, or legal domains. However, little is known about the symbolic power that soft lifting has on the sense of self. Based on recent advances in behavioral priming, we hypothesized that soft lifting can influence the signals one sends to oneself; more specifically, soft lifting may prime individuals to experience an inauthentic sense of self, which, in turn, prompts further unethical behavior. In Study 1, we showed that participants, primed with the memory of a recent soft lifting experience, cheated more than participants recalling a recent experience of purchasing authentic software or than control participants. Moreover, feelings of inauthenticity mediated the priming effect of soft lifting on dishonest behavior. In Study 2, participants primed with soft lifting showed a greater willingness to purchase a wide range of counterfeit products over authentic products. Besides those antecedents or correlates of soft lifting already identified in the literature, educators should pay more attention to the negative impact of soft lifting on the self-images of users, which may go beyond computer-related behaviors. Priming may provide a new direction for HCI researchers to examine the impact of computer-use-related factors on users' perceptions, motivations, and behaviors.

The downloading of copyrighted content has been a common concern for the motion picture and music recording industries, but their public relations response has been quite different.

A significant, moderate correlation of attributes used to frame this issue was found between the RIAA press releases and media coverage, but not between the MPAA press releases and the media.

Downloading?

Internet Piracy as a Hobby: What Happens When the Brazilian Jeitinho Meets Television

Pokazal je, da internet ne prinaša samo pozitivnih učinkov – da ni čudežno orožje za širjenje demokracije in rušenje diktatorjev, da osvobajanje podatkov še ne prinaša odgovornejše politike, da nas elektronsko druženje lahko tudi razdvaja in da se na družabnih omrežjih ne širi samo napredna politika, ampak tudi nacionalizem, rasizem, ksenofobija in režimska propaganda.

irst, research shows that social-networking sites are a serious risk when accessed at work.

Facebook at work". It may sound ridiculous, but the purpose is to ensure that employees are not putting their personal and corporate data out to tender.

he irony in all this is that Facebook - which in September 2007 overtook MySpace in Britain as the preferred site for individual users - was originally set up to mirror rather than overturn the "intimacy" and exclusiveness of real-world, face-to-face networks. Andrew McCollum, one of the founders of Facebook, explained to me that they based the project on a pretty closed community, namely university colleges.

Why has the Internet changed so little?

The Internet Age was meant to change everything - internationalism, commerce, journalism, government - all would be transformed, made equal and boundless by the click. It's time to admit this has simply failed to happen, and what is more interesting than the bad forecasting is the reason that they seemed so tempting in the first place.

More generally, the global medium of the internet would shrink the universe, promote dialogue between nations, and foster global understanding. In brief, the internet would be an unstoppable force: like the invention of print and gunpowder, it would change society permanently and irrevocably.

After Leveson: the internet needs regulation to halt 'information terrorism'

We are heading into a future of no regulation with the internet where its monoliths will have plenty of clout, pretty well unfettered by democratic national governments (but not totalitarian ones, like China).

How does information terrorism work?What's coming in the future could be far more deadly, involving widespread smears, character assassinations and the destruction of companies and maybe even institutions. And by then we may not have a vigorous press to hold it to account.