Teenage kicks or virtual villainy? Internet piracy, moral entrepreneurship and the social construction of a crime problem

Abstract

When it comes to Internet crime issues, it can fairly be suggested that the ‘problem’ of online piracy has been one of the two most hotly debated topics, seldom far from the public gaze over recent years (the other being child pornography – see Jewkes and Andrews, this volume). While the unauthorised sharing of copyrighted materials has a decades-long history, it was only in 1999 that widespread controversy ignited over this isssue, making the online file-sharing service Napster into something of a cause celebre. Internet piracy (especially in relation to music) provides, I would suggest, an exemplar of how new crime problems are being socially constructed in the era of the Internet. Moreover, the phenomenon of music downloading, and the varied social responses to it, can be located at the intersection of a number of sociologically interesting issues, for example the commercialisation of the Internet, the role of capitalist interests in shaping crime problems and responses to them, the development of youth identities through consumption of popular culture, and the social dynamics of labelling and resistance. Of central importance here is the process of ‘moral entrepreneurship’ (Becker, 1963), a concerted enterprise on the part of empowered social actors to redefine the boundaries and limits of transgression; such entrepreneurship typically articulates and supports some sectional social, political, economic or cultural interest (Hall et al., 1978; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994). In the case of music piracy, we seethe ways in which organised economic interests (the recording industry and its allies) have attempted to create a new moral consensus about music downloading as a form of harmful criminal activity, and those (predominantly young) people who engage in it as ‘parasites’ and ‘thieves’. However, as we shall see, such endeavours have not been straightforwardly successful in constructing piracy as a crime problem; rather, they have been met with strategies of resistance that refuse and contest this process of labelling, turning claims about theft and immorality back upon the entrepreneurs themselves.

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