Piracy has been a sharp thorn on the bottom of legitimate merchants for as far as recorded history goes. It has evolved from the pirates that attack merchants ships at sea made out of wood and powered by winds, to digital pirates who profit from other people’s digital material at the click of the download button.
While there have been numerous measures in place to counter piracy, the solutions given forth often are counteracted by pirates using more sophisticated pirating technology. You only need to look at the number of times piracy sites like Pirate Bay have been shut down, and how resilient they’ve become by always springing back to life.
Perhaps the fight against piracy has been fought all this time long using the wrong ammunitions. Maybe we should let people’s fear of God work for the anti-piracy campaign. Particularly one of the Ten Commandments held in high regards by Christians, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’
TorrentFreak has tabled a report on a research done by Australian researchers who studied the correlation between religious attitudes and piracy. The study found out that very religious people are less likely to pirate compare to the less religious ones.
The respondents in this study were asked whom would they listen to most; their pastor, friend, religion or God, if they were to ask them to stop pirating.
“Among the four referents, only God was the referent with the strongest influence that could discourage respondents from buying pirated media,” said, one of the researchers.
In other words, if people were asked by their religion or pastor not to pirate, they are highly unlikely to follow their instructions.
“Religious institutions, in cooperation with educational institutions, could work together to communicate a strong message against digital piracy,” the research concluded.