Parallel Norms: File-sharing and Contemporary Copyright Development in Australia

This article studies contemporary Australian copyright and contrasts this to a large-scale online survey on file sharing in order to analyse the seemingly parallel and non-compliant legal and social norms that they represent. Furthermore, a selection of 3,575 Australian respondents to an online survey is compared to a large scale near global group of over 96,000 respondents, allowing determining distinctive traits of the Australian respondents. For example, the latter use offline methods for sharing and receive rather than distribute content to a higher extent in comparison to the global group of respondents. Furthermore, Australian respondents also have slightly less predominance of male sharers.