Few days ago, The lawyer Simone Aliprandi published the results of his survey, done in 2011 for his PhD thesis, titled “Copyright in the digital age. An empirical research about behaviours, social perceptions and level of awareness between internet users”. The
main tool used for this research study was an online questionnaire based on the CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interviewing) method.

The questionnaire was posted both in Italian and English version on the open source platform Limesurvey and remained available online for 4 months without any filter or limitations (from February 1 to June 1, 2011).

The survey is divided in two section: the first one is dedicated to Italy, and the second one to the rest of the world. Aliprandi interviewed about 1,800 people (1,300 for Italy and 500 for the rest of the world). More than anything else, the main pourpose of Aliprandi was to explore how copyright can be analyzed from a sociological point of view. This, as Aliprandi said, can be considered a sort of a “pilot research”.

Therefore, this study address three broader research fields:

• most common behaviors of Internet users when they get, distribute, or otherwise deal with online content under copyright;
• the average perception of Internet users about copyright itself, that is, whether they see it as a primary or minor problem, a useful tool or a useless burden, etc.;
• the level of awareness of Internet users about mechanisms and principles currently governing copyright law, in order to expose their actual level of knowledge on related issues.

We would like to remind that Aliprandi chose to use open content licenses, both on the web and in open access journals.

Today we decided to analize the Italian part of the study, whose results gives interesting “food for thought”.

We would like to underline that the main part of the “respondents” are in the target 18-44 with a medium-high level of education (80%).

First of all we can say that emerges clearly the perception’s deficit still present in our Country about the copyright’s protection. Those who illegally download didn’t perceive
a sense of guilty for that action. The illegal downloading of programs, creative contents, music files is not perceived like stealing a cd, dvd or even a book from a store. Even if many of them knows that downloading file in that way is illegal, they already know that is generally accepted / acceptable. We can conclude that the main problem is the “social perception”, even because the great part of the repondents believe that the illegal download damages the companies that produce and sell the work, and not the entire creative and social-economic system.

For more information http://copyrightsurvey.blogspot.it/