For more than twenty years, messages have been sent to dissuade Internet users from pirating cultural content protected by copyright. Including in France. But it appears that some of these operations produce rather the opposite effect.
Piracy is a common act (14 million pirates in France in March 2020) which penalizes many sectors, foremost among which are the music and film industries, as well as game and software producers. Estimates show that 37% of the world’s software is pirated, representing a loss of revenue that exceeds $46 billion. Faced with these illicit practices, professionals and the regulator have designed and implemented strategies, sometimes aggressive, aimed at discouraging such behavior.
In May 2023, the National Center for Cinema and Animated Images CNC and the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) launched a radio spot campaign to call for support for creation by avoiding illegal practices.
Since the 2000s, it has been common for users to be exposed to anti-piracy messages in the media or at the start of a work. However, despite the clear intentions of the creators of these messages, the effects of the latter are sometimes attenuated or, worse, counterproductive.
Here is the irony of the situation: some campaigns aimed at discouraging piracy may ultimately be helping to encourage it. The reason ? A lack of understanding of certain aspects of human behavior.
“ Would you steal a car? », announced an anti-piracy campaign in 2000
How then can we design a relevant campaign on such a subject? Behavioral science comes to the aid of the sectors concerned by highlighting three fundamental errors likely to encourage piracy instead of discouraging it. These three common errors are based on the mental shortcut that suggests that “more is always better than less”.
The first of these errors is to bombard the public with a long list of arguments against piracy. The designers of these messages believe that the arguments add up to each other and therefore that a greater number of arguments better serves the cause defended. Unfortunately, the audience tends to adopt average reasoning: the strongest arguments in terms of persuasive power are diluted by the simultaneous presence of weak arguments.
For example, the video spot “ Piracy is theft ”, broadcast in the United Kingdom at the start of the films in the 2000s began with “ Would you steal a car? Never ! » By comparing piracy to reasonably relevant examples (stealing a DVD) while adding seemingly incongruous examples like stealing a car, the message was diluted. This spot subsequently gave rise to numerous parodies or diversions which ridiculed it.
A second mistake is, as the campaign currently underway in the UK does, to explain the impact of piracy using lots of numbers, such as the number of jobs lost or the amount of damage caused to affected industries. These statistics are often cold, incapable of arousing emotions and, in some ways, dehumanizing.
A quote attributed to Stalin sums up this idea well:
“ The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic “.
The fact that people cannot identify with a clearly defined victim and feel emotions deprives some anti-piracy messages of much-needed emotional power.
“ Everyone does it ! »: in short, we do like the others
The third mistake is to emphasize how widespread piracy is. Claiming, as an advertisement recently did in Latvia, that “ 46% of the population has already pirated films on the Internet » unintentionally signals a social norm. The potential hacker may therefore just feel that he is behaving like everyone else.
In conclusion, not hacking “like everyone else” would amount to being “the turkey of the joke”. Recently, an edifying experience showed this again: by seeking to reduce the theft of fossilized wood, the “Petrified Forest” national park in Arizona actually led to an increase in the number of thefts when the signs mentioned that a large number of visitors were flying.
Although these errors are widespread, there are relatively simple tactics to correct them. A first option would be to select the most powerful arguments. Another option would be to replace or combine the often dry statistics with stories from well-identified victims of piracy, capable of arousing strong emotional reactions. Finally, to avoid the trap of social norms, it often seems preferable to emphasize the injunction not to hack or to mention the number of people who have decided not to hack anymore.
Human behavior is complex and the usual “more is better than less” shortcuts can seem convincing. However, when it comes to effectively influencing human behavior, behavioral science can help design more effective campaigns. It therefore appears urgent to integrate them into the reflection at an early stage, including for other crucial issues such as climate change or the fight against poverty.
Gilles Grolleau, Professor, ESSCA School of Management and Luc Meunier, Professor of Finance, ESSCA School of Management
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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