A brand hegemony rejection explanation for digital piracy

Abstract

BHR is found useful in understanding pirating motivations, which vary greatly across time and across digital mediums. Piracy is often motivated by profit enhancing policies of big media copyright holders, which are deemed unfair and not customer oriented, but such motivations are greatly reduced when copyright holders offer attractive legal means to obtain digital content. Pirates generally do not feel sympathy for large media companies, but some pirates feel guilt that their actions may hurt digital content creators.