online piracy argumentative essay

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The Digital-Piracy Dilemma

• Michael D. Smith
• Brett Danaher

Do buzz and publicity outweigh the lost sales?

New research suggests that piracy can help promote films and other digital products. But the authors warn against reading too much into that research: In most cases, they say, the costs of piracy still outweigh the benefits, and consumers therefore still deserve protections from piracy.

In the world of film, one of the most important things copyright owners can do is market their content online to increase awareness and revenue. At the same time, they have to protect their content from internet piracy, which chips away at sales. This is an often-discussed dilemma — but two recent peer-reviewed papers ( here  and  here ) suggest that these two goals may not always be in tension. Piracy, the papers suggest, can actually boost sales of some digital products by increasing word-of-mouth and overall market awareness. This has led some industry observers to argue that efforts by firms and governments to combat digital piracy may be wasted.

• MS Michael D. Smith is the J. Erik Jonsson professor of information technology and marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College and Tepper School of Business.
• BD Brett Danaher is an associate professor of economics and management science at Chapman University. He is the co-founder and organizer of the Entertainment Analytics Conference, which annually brings together the top academic and industry data scientists focused on the entertainment ecosystem.

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Is downloading really stealing? The ethics of digital piracy

Head of the School of Philosophy, Australian National University

Disclosure statement

Christian Barry receives funding from the Australian Research Council for the project The Ethical Responsibilities of Consumers

Australian National University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Many millions of people throughout the world will illegally download the fifth season of Game of Thrones , released today by HBO. Legally speaking, what they will be doing is a violation of intellectual property rights, or “piracy”. But will they be doing anything morally wrong ?

It might seem obvious that what they will do is wrong. After all, it is illegal. But there are many things that have been illegal that people don’t think are morally wrong. Same-sex relationships, divorce and many other practices that are now widely accepted as morally acceptable were once outlawed and criminally sanctioned.

Few people think they were wrong just before they were legalised. Rather, they tend to think the laws governing these behaviours were unjust. So appeal only to the illegality of downloading doesn’t settle whether it is okay, morally speaking.

Opposing views

Two rival camps dominate public discussion around the ethics of illegal downloading. On the one hand, there are what might be called “fundamentalist libertarians”. These think that all ideas and artistic creation should be held in common and be freely accessible to all .

In their view, intellectual property, in the form of copyright and patents, unfairly restricts access to ideas and expression . They consider illegal downloading to be victimless crime, and do not think it imposes significant cost on anyone. In their view, the serious criminal sanctions that sometimes attach to illegal downloading are draconian and unjustified.

On the other hand, there are what might be called the “fundamentalist protectors”. This camp thinks that illegal downloading is equivalent to common theft.

This view is vividly expressed in the aggressive message that often precedes films in Australia:

You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a television, you wouldn’t steal a movie. Downloading pirated films is stealing.

According to fundamentalist protectors, owners of intellectual property deserve just as much protection and means for redress as those who have had their handbags or televisions stolen, including civil and criminal sanction against those who have violated their intellectual property.

For them, the massive penalties that are sometimes attached to illegal downloading are important because they send a clear message that this practice should not be tolerated. This seems to be the view of much of the entertainment industry , as well as public officials and legislatures in countries that produce and export a lot of intellectual property.

In a recent speech , for example, US President Barak Obama claimed:

We’re going to aggressively protect our intellectual property […] Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people […] It is essential to our prosperity. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it.

Excluding theft

Despite their currency, both of these positions are overdrawn and seem at odds with moral common sense. The fundamentalist protector position is problematic because there are clear and morally relevant differences between stealing someone’s handbag and illegally downloading a television series.

In common theft, the owner of property is entirely deprived of its use, as well as their ability to share it and dispose of it as they choose. Common theft is zero-sum: when I steal your handbag, my gain really is your loss.

The same is not true when I download a digital file of your copyrighted property. In downloading your film, I have not excluded you from its use, or your ability to benefit from it. I have simply circumvented your ability to exclude me from its use. To draw an analogy, this seems more like trespassing on your land than taking your land away from you.

Criminal sanctions seem warranted in thefts where one person’s gain is very clearly another person’s loss. But things are not so clear when the relationship between gain and loss are more complex.

And of course there are ways that owners of intellectual property can gain, overall, from infringements of their rights. The more accessible their products become, the more people may want to consume them. This certainly seems to be the case with products like Game of Thrones, a fact recognised by its producers .

Protecting public goods

On the other hand, the fundamentalist libertarian position is problematic because it treats all intellectual property infringement as a victimless crime. For one thing, intellectual property rights are an important means by which people gain profit from the effort that they put into the production of creative works.

That they can profit in this way provides an important incentive – aside from the intrinsic value of the productive activity itself – for them to engage in socially useful productive activity.

This is evident in other fields, such as research and development of medical treatments: firms have little reason to invest the time and resources in developing vaccines and other public goods if they cannot benefit from their distribution.

Thus, not protecting the rights of the producers in some meaningful way is bad for everyone. Infringing intellectual property rights can also increase cost to those do pay for the good, in the form of higher prices. Those who pay for intellectual property are effectively subsidising its use by those who do not pay for it. In most cases this seems unfair.

A different kind of theft

The question of the morality of illegal downloading is so difficult because it takes place in an environment in which the penalties attached to this behaviour ordinarily seem to be overkill, but where there are pretty clear social costs to engaging in it.

What, then, should be done? For starters, it seems important to stop treating intellectual property infringement as common theft, and to develop different legal remedies for its protection. Various kinds of property are different, and warrant different forms of protection. This is hardly a novel idea.

In his fascinating book, 13 Ways to Steal a Bicycle: Theft Law in the Information Age , the legal philosopher Stuart Green has pointed out that treating all infringement of property as theft subject to the same legal rubric is a relatively new development.

Prior to the 20th Century, theft law consisted of a sort of ad hoc collection of specific theft offences and specific kinds of property that were subject to theft. Different rules applied to different offences, and intangible forms of property, like intellectual property, were not included in theft law at all. We may need to return to rules that are well suited to protecting different forms of property.

In the meantime, it seems incumbent on consumers to try to respect intellectual property unless doing so imposes unreasonable cost on them. Refraining from accessing patented essential medicines that are inaccessible due to price does seem unduly costly. Refraining from watching the latest season of Game of Thrones, the ardour of its fans notwithstanding, does not.

At the same time, we should also strongly resist massive penalties levied on downloaders when they are caught. The practice of “ speculative invoicing ” – whereby people are sent threatening letters that offer the opportunity to pay a sum to prevent legal action seeking vast sums – is seriously objectionable. Even if what the downloaders have done is wrong, it is much worse to over-punish them.

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The Ethics of Book Pirating

The ethical and legal issues surrounding the illegal downloading of music and film have been exhaustively played out in the media, court and public opinion.  And yet, people continue to pirate media. An often overlooked area of media piracy—at least in comparison to that of music, film and television—is the pirating of books.  The rise of “ebooks” – digital versions of publications that can be read on computers or special electronic devices - has made book piracy much more viable. However, scanned PDFs have been a problem for some time.  Author Stephanie Meyer abandoned her ‘Twilight’ saga novel Midnight Sun due to leaked online drafts. Despite differences between books and other media, ethical debate over book pirating often simply runs in accordance with the principles laid down in the existing, lively ethical discussion over music, film and television piracy.

Debates about media piracy generally focus on the following contested areas:

1)       The rights of the creator to control the distribution of their work;

2)       The practical effects of the infringement, both in terms of the potential harms to producers and to consumers;

3)       The conflict between changing consumer demands and established distribution practices.

The arguments around ownership and rights to work are well established. However, consumers, even those who are sympathetic to those principles, continue to pirate. This sociological reality points to an interesting intersection of people’s abstract ethical views and their day to day behavior. It would be fair to say that I, myself have my own opinions on the morality of pirating books which are to a significant degree based upon the rights of creators. However, I think that rather than simply bang a drum about the inherent validity of intellectual property rights, we must seek to understand why it is that certain individuals find these arguments to be unpersuasive, or outweighed by other moral and practical considerations.

Without this understanding, I do not feel that we can come to accurate conclusions about the ethical status of book piracy and any policy considerations that result from this status. Book piracy has certain significant differences to piracy of other forms of media in both of these areas. The interplay between views on the practicalities and principles of book pirating played out on the blog of author Celine Kiernan and both she and a commenter, Eoin Purcell, editor of Irish Publishing News , were contacted for their views.

One significant factor that separates book pirating from other forms of copyright infringement is that while other pirated media is recognized as primarily functioning as entertainment, reading is considered to be an educational activity, even when the material consumed is not explicitly educational itself. Reading for pleasure is a socially virtuous pastime, encouraged by governments, parents and educational institutions. Does this greater social value put upon reading, as opposed to other forms of media, in some ways change how people perceive the ethical implications of their actions? Although laws are codified with general ethical maxims in mind, when it comes to the ethical choices that people make, moral considerations do not exist in a vacuum, but are instead infiltrated by cultural values that are placed on various activities. When you consider the degree to which reading is encouraged, particularly in direct contrast to the consumption of film and television, it is plausible that people internalize these messages in such a way that they place less weight on the immorality of depriving the author of compensation

This perception could well be bolstered by the many opportunities for readers (at least in Western countries) to legally acquire books through methods that are free at point of access and, unlike radio or television broadcasts, at the time of the reader’s choosing. These avenues – libraries and borrowing from friends – permeate modern western society, such that the idea of reading being a free pastime is embedded in our social consciousness. Indeed, one might ask, given that there is the option to borrow a book from a library, why the option of illegally downloading the same book makes any difference.

One difference is, of course, the consent of the author and publisher. Authors and publishers consent to the use of their works in the library system, often in exchange for remuneration based on the popularity of the title. Celine Kiernan also points out that libraries perform a valuable service for both authors and publishers. “... library loans are a concrete way of proving the popularity of a title - in other words they add to the author's reputation (unlike piracy figures where it is generally assumed that pirates download and share in bulk and don't really care what it is they are distributing).”

“Libraries are also a wonderful support system for authors, often giving so much back in terms of arranged readings, coordinating school visits, facilitating book clubs etc. etc. They are a  genuine  source of word of mouth recommendation and a wonderful resource. I am a huge supporter of the library system.”

Kiernan’s focus on ‘genuine’ word of mouth recommendations carries through to her assessment of lending of books to friends, which she supports due to the fact that “A friend will only give you a book that they have seriously liked.”

Kiernan persuasively shows how the library system is generally beneficial for both the reader and the author such that there is a clear difference in effect between a free text via an illegal download and a free text via a visit to the library.

However the primary purpose of libraries is not to benefit authors and publishers, but rather to allow for the education of the public as a form of social good. In that case, the ethical distinction between library use and illegal downloading is less clear cut and comes down to whether or not you believe the effect on the author is more important than your own convenience. Functionally, libraries work to allow for the public dissemination of knowledge and maximization of the social good of reading, while mitigating the effect on authors. If one continues to disregard the consent of the author, one must therefore look at the qualitative differences between library borrowing and book piracy.

As with other discussions about piracy, much time has been given to the potential benefits of book pirating, both in terms of increased publicity and word of mouth and potential increased sales. When Celine Kiernan discussed the pirating of her works on her blog, Eoin Purcell‘s comment summed up this view, asking “what if any evidence is there that these pirated copies are costing you sales?” He rightly points out that there is no formula to determine how many sales are lost to illegal downloads. Speaking to Purcell over email, he clarifies that he does personally believe that pirating of books harms authors, although he places an emphasis on the harms suffered by more popular authors, stating “The adage (I think from Tim O'Reilly) that 'piracy is progressive taxation' is a good one.” This is in contrast to Kiernan’s view that less mainstream authors can often be most affected, as “the smaller you are, the more vulnerable you are to fluctuations in profit margin. This means that the more challenging work, the quirkier work, the less mainstream work is in much more danger of sinking due to lack of sales, as are the small press publishers who give that kind of work a chance.”

Purcell agrees that while the moral considerations of piracy are relevant, the practical effects of the issue are perhaps more important when it comes to formulating policy.

While I think piracy is immoral, I think the costs of fighting it are higher than the returns from fighting it. Further, I suspect that there are considerable uncounted benefits from piracy that while not forgiving the piracy do go some way to ameliorate the impact on authors and publishers.

On a practical level, book piracy does not have some of the potential extrinsic benefits of other forms of piracy. Unlike music piracy, authors do not tend to sell out 50,000 seat stadia for readings of their works, and so cannot rely on fans who have enjoyed their works for free supporting them through the purchase of tickets for live events. Similarly, the increasing appeal and functionality of e-readers means that there is no equivalent to a Hi-Definition DVD offering extra features that are difficult to find online. The only avenue for converting illegal downloads into income is the purchase of a legitimate e-book or the purchase of a print copy. Purchase of a print copy due to a desire to own a physical book is a plausible occurrence, but ebook sales are continuing to rise, meaning that the number of those who are prepared to do so will only diminish.

However, this is not purely a practical issue. With the generally high-level of quality of pirated ebooks, the purchase of a legitimate electronic copy of ‘A Poison Throne’ when the reader already possesses an illegal copy requires an exclusively moral decision. After all, there is no practical reason to pay money to replace something that is identical and so the decision to purchase that ebook or further books from the same author must be based on a feeling that the author “deserves” to be compensated. If it is the case that illegal downloads can convert into sales then this highlights a disconnect between the moral considerations that consumers have and the idea that a creator simply deserves compensation regardless of the value the consumer places upon their work.

Celine points to some examples that would seem to back up this view,

When   Cat Valente   recently made The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making   available free […] online, it sent sales of the actual physical book shooting into the New York Times top ten best sellers list. When my friend   Charles Cecil   did something similar with free downloads of   Broken Sword , sales of legitimate downloads spiked for a good two week period.

However, Celine goes on to make a valid point,

I argue that the two things (the public attitude to something that has been given to for free, as opposed to that which has been pirated) are too disparate to speak for each other. There is a kind of personal contact implicit in the 'freely given' work that seems to strengthen the bond between the author and the reader. It seems, for want of a better word, to humanize the author to the reader, to promote a kind of understanding, and so encourages the desire to reward the creator for the work that they've put into the project.

Throughout my interaction with Kiernan, she emphasized her view that book pirating is both a cause and result of an alienation of the reader from the author.  She describes how,

[Piracy] seems to push the creator even further into the background to the point where, if they step forward at all they are treated with distrust and hostility... you are 'that grasping money grubber who wants me to pay for something when I   don’t have to.' In discussions on piracy, authors and publishers are often very quickly reduced to a faceless 'they'.

This points us towards an interesting development in media, where the ‘right’ to compensation is based on the perceived quality of the material, rather than the use. The problem with this view is of course the enforcement mechanism, as well as a feedback mechanism on authors popularity that does not take into account illegal downloads.

Following the discussion on Celine Kiernan’s blog, Niall Alexander analyzed the potential effects of the piracy of books on sales ranks . One interesting titbit was the fact that sales of 1,475 books in a week propelled an author to number 9 in the UK Times bestseller list. A single server hosting illegal downloads of Kiernan’s novel A Poison Throne recorded 764 downloads of the novel since it was uploaded. It seems to follow that if even only a fraction of illegal downloads negatively affect sales, then rankings and the publisher support and publicity that go with them can be profoundly affected and vice-versa. In the absence of hard data, it would be a hasty moral action to base decisions on this factor.

This raises the question of whether or not consumers should be required to alter their behavior if it negatively impacts on authors, or whether it is the responsibility of authors and publishers to adapt to changing consumer demands.

If you are a believer in the absolute nature of the intrinsic right of creators to control their own works, then the responsibility and moral failing clearly falls on the consumer. However, a more practical view of the situation, considering the complex ways in which consumers behave relative to moral beliefs and practical wants, seems to point to the need for publishers to adapt their marketing and distribution networks in order to ameliorate the effects of an ongoing practice which many see as a victimless crime.

Susan Connolly can be contacted at  and is the author of Damsel, a children's fantasy novel and takes a great interest in the ethics of everyday life.

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Comment and Technology

Why should we stop online piracy.

By Matthew Yglesias

19 January 2012

Congressional bill names are a reliable indicator of the state of conventional wisdom in the US. That Congress is weighing bills called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) tells us that, at a minimum, the idea of stopping online piracy is popular.

It shouldn’t be. There’s no evidence that the US is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalise it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.

Much of the debate about SOPA and PIPA has thus far centred around the entertainment industry’s absurdly inflated claims about the economic harm of copyright infringement. When making these calculations, intellectual property owners tend to assume that every unauthorised download represents a lost sale. This is clearly false. Often people copy a file illegally precisely because they’re unwilling to pay the market price. Were unauthorised copying not an option, they would simply not watch the movie or listen to the album.

Dead weight bounce

Critics of industry estimates have repeatedly made this point and argued against the inflated figures used by SOPA and Protect IP boosters. But an equally large problem is the failure to consider the benefits of illegal downloading. These benefits can be a simple reduction of what economists call “dead-weight loss”. Dead-weight loss exists any time the profit-maximising price of a unit of something exceeds the cost of producing an extra unit. In a highly competitive market in which many sellers are offering largely undifferentiated goods, profit margins are low and dead-weight loss is tiny. But the whole point of copyright is that the owner of the rights to, say, Breaking Bad has a monopoly on sales of new episodes of the show. At the same time, producing an extra copy of a Breaking Bad episode is nearly free. So when the powers that be decide that the profit-maximising strategy is to charge more than $100 to download all four seasons of Breaking Bad from iTunes, they’re creating a situation in which lots of people who’d gain $15 or $85 worth of enjoyment from watching the show can’t watch it. This is “dead-weight loss”, and to the extent that copyright infringement reduces it, infringement is a boon to society.

After all, things like public libraries, used bookstores, and the widespread practice of lending books to friends all cost publishers money. But nobody (I hope) is going to introduce the Stop Used-Book Stores Now Act purely on these grounds. The public policy question is not whether the libraries are bad for publishers, but whether libraries are beneficial on balance .

Download or pizza?

By the same token, even when copyright infringement does lead to real loss of revenue to copyright owners, it’s not as if the money vanishes into a black hole. Suppose Joe Downloader uses BitTorrent to get a free copy of Beggars Banquet rather than forking over $7.99 to Amazon , and then goes out to eat some pizza. In this case, the Rolling Stones’s loss is the pizzeria’s gain and Joe gets to listen to a classic album. It’s at least not obvious that we should regard this, on balance, as harmful.

Meanwhile, the benefits of forcing copyright holders to compete with free-but-illegal downloads are considerable. I am not, personally, in the habit of infringing on copyrights (though I will cop to some book lending and the fact that my fiancée and I, like any sensible couple, share Netflix and Hulu subscriptions) but recently have found myself firing up btjunkie.org again. Why? Because the BBC in its infinite wisdom decided to start airing season 2 of its excellent programme Sherlock in the UK without making it available at any price to Americans [including the author]. That’s dumb, but until relatively recently it was a universal problem. It used to be that studios and labels didn’t make their wares available to people willing to pay for them. That created an underground market for pirated TV shows and music. The pirated market, in turn, pressured the entertainment industry to create legal options such as iTunes and Hulu. The illegal competition is a valuable consumer pressure on the industry.

This is not to say that we should have no copyright law or that there should be no penalties for piracy. Used-book stores may slightly depress sales of new books, but they don’t threaten to destroy the entire publishing industry. Large-scale, unimpeded, commercialised digital reproduction of other people’s works really could destroy the US’s creative industries. But the question to ask about the state of intellectual property policy is whether there’s a problem from the consumer side. If infringement got out of hand, we might face a bleak scenario in which bands stop recording albums and no new TV shows are released.

But we’re clearly not living in that world. There are plenty of books to read, things to watch and music to listen to. Indeed, the US consumer has never been better-entertained than she is today. The same digital frontier that’s created the piracy pseudo-problem has created whole new companies and made it infinitely easier for small operations to distribute their products. Digital technology has reduced the price we pay for new works and made them cheaper to create. I can watch a feature film on my telephone.

The US economy has plenty of problems, but lack of adequate entertainment options is not on the list. SOPA isn’t just an overly intrusive way to solve a problem, it’s a “solution” to a problem that’s not a problem.

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The politics of piracy: political ideology and the usage of pirated online media

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There is a lack of clarity in information systems research on which factors lead people to use or not use technologies of varying degrees of perceived legality. To address this gap, we use arguments from the information systems and political ideology literatures to theorize on the influence of individuals’ political ideologies on online media piracy. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals with a more conservative ideology, and thus lower openness to experience and higher conscientiousness, generally engage in less online media piracy. We further hypothesize that this effect is stronger for online piracy technology that is legally ambiguous. Using clickstream data from 3873 individuals in the U.S., we find that this effect in fact exists only for online media piracy technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous. Specifically, more conservative individuals, who typically have lower ambiguity intolerance, use (legal but ambiguously perceived) pirated streaming websites less, while there is no difference for the (clearly illegal) use of pirated file sharing websites.

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1 Introduction

Since its inception, the Internet has, despite providing great benefits to society, also enabled a large variety of illegal and potentially harmful activities. For instance, when Napster, the online peer-to-peer file sharing platform that had been widely used to download pirated material, first emerged in 1999, it triggered a paradigm shift which has had substantial consequences for how media content has been consumed ever since. Illegal file sharing almost became a “national pastime” [ 1 ], with 30 billion songs being illegally downloaded from file sharing platforms between 2004 and 2009 alone [ 2 ]. As Lars Ulrich, one of the founding members of the American heavy metal band Metallica, put it: “Napster hijacked our music without asking. They never sought our permission. Our catalogue of music simply became available as free downloads on the Napster system” [ 3 ].

Naturally, in recent years, scholars have exhibited great interest in understanding the implications of such pirated media distribution networks and have paid particular attention to two aspects. First, scholars scrutinized how file sharing relates to existing copyright laws and whether changes to these laws appear expedient given the emergence of this new technology [ 4 , 5 , 6 ]. Second, they have sought to understand the economic impact of file sharing technologies, for instance regarding cannibalization of product sales [ 7 , 8 , 9 ].

Given the important legal and economic ramifications of pirated media distribution technologies which were identified in such prior work, a host of research concerned itself with understanding the factors that drive users to use or not use such technologies. However, extant research is starkly limited in three important aspects. First, prior research is limited in its measurement of piracy. Most studies rely on self-report measures [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ], which are likely to suffer from social desirability bias in research that covers a topic as sensitive as online media piracy. Second, extant research is limited regarding the dependent variable. It overwhelmingly focuses on merely explaining attitudes or intentions regarding piracy rather than on explaining actual behavior [ 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. The few studies that do study actual piracy behavior [ 16 , 17 ] suffer from the abovementioned problem of self-reports. Third, extant studies are limited regarding their choice of independent variables. In particular, most research studies antecedents like national income level and level of education [ 18 ], self-control [ 11 , 12 , 19 ], motivations [ 17 ], or attitudes [ 11 , 12 ]. However, there is hardly any research that goes beyond such surface-level demographics or rather malleable psychological constructs and that studies users’ more stable underlying personalities. Brown and MacDonald’s [ 10 ] study is a notable exception in that they link the personality traits of honesty–humility, conscientiousness, and openness to experience to illegal media content downloading. However, like much other research, they relied on self-reports and only studied attitudes towards piracy. In sum, there is still a very limited understanding of the deep-level antecedents of engagement in this kind of online behavior.

Advancing our understanding of the issue, however, is important, not the least because technology has already evolved further and now provides other means than file sharing for consuming media content. Such file sharing denotes a peer-to-peer technology where users upload and download, and thus share, files via an online platform. The second dominant form [ 20 ] of consuming online pirated content is streaming, i.e., a process in which the content is consumed online and not permanently downloaded [ 21 ]. While a substantial number of legal paid offers such as Netflix and iTunes have emerged and keep emerging, a large array of possibilities to digitally consume such content without compensation for the rights holder exists as well. We will refer to such services as “pirated file sharing” and “pirated online streaming” throughout the paper.

In our paper, we aim to address the important gap in our understanding of the antecedents of online piracy by drawing on the notion of political ideology and its underlying motivational structure. Specifically, there are three personality characteristics that are tightly linked to the motives determining political ideology and which form the basis of our theorizing: Openness to experience, conscientiousness, and ambiguity intolerance [ 22 ].

We hypothesize that openness to experience and conscientiousness are linked to the use of new technologies. In particular, we propose that people higher in openness to experience are more likely to engage in online media piracy because they tend to be more inquisitive and more unconventional and thus more likely to try new things, even when they might be illegal [ 10 ]. People higher in conscientiousness, in contrast, are typically less likely to engage in online media piracy because they usually ascribe greater importance to order and diligence and thus disapprove of behavior that can be considered to involve breaking rules [ 10 ]. Similarly, we contend that ambiguity intolerance is crucial to understanding differences in the use of pirated online streaming and file sharing websites. We expect pirated online streaming websites, whose legal situation remains unclear to the general public [ 23 , 24 ], to be used to a lesser extent by individuals with stronger ambiguity intolerance. In contrast, we expect to observe no such differences for file sharing websites, the primary purpose of which is clearly illegal in the U.S.

We empirically capture openness to experience, conscientiousness, and ambiguity intolerance by measuring individuals’ political ideologies, i.e., the extent of their liberal or conservative attitudes. Prior scholars have demonstrated that individuals’ political ideologies are linked to openness to experience and conscientiousness [ 25 ], as well as ambiguity intolerance [ 26 , 27 , 28 ], and have already introduced political ideology to information systems research [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 ].

We apply an innovative measure of political ideology [ 33 ] based on a methodology by Flaxman et al. [ 34 ] which allows us to infer individuals’ ideologies from their online media consumption. Specifically, we analyze clickstream data which tracks the web browsing behavior of 3873 individuals in the U.S. and link their political ideologies and their visits to a list of websites that offer pirated media content in the form of either downloads or streaming services. We find broad support for our theorizing.

Our paper makes several contributions. We contribute to the online piracy literature [ 17 ], particularly that on the effects of personality [ 10 ], by explaining online piracy through users’ political ideology. We detail the underlying theoretical mechanisms and move beyond a simplistic reiteration of the stereotype that conservatives are generally less likely to use new technologies such as online media piracy websites. In particular, we identify political ideology as an important explanatory variable for the diverging adoption of pirated file sharing and online streaming, two technologies that differ in the ambiguity of their legal status. Our theoretical link and the corresponding empirical findings thus provide a more nuanced view on the subject of online media piracy than does prior literature. Furthermore, we add to the wider literature that strives to explain technology use through personality characteristics. We contend that our findings may have more general consequences for predicting the use of new technologies or services that may be ambiguous regarding their perceived legality [ 35 , 36 ], and which might thus be used to different degrees by people of different levels of ambiguity tolerance.

2 Theory and hypotheses

2.1 political ideology, openness to experience, and conscientiousness as antecedents of online media piracy.

A core tenet of political ideology research is that differences in ideology are grounded in differences in underlying personality characteristics [ 22 , 37 ]. Thus, individuals’ political ideologies, conceptualized as their more liberal or more conservative attitudes and beliefs, are the reflection of fairly stable personality traits rather than merely differences in situational circumstances [ 38 , 39 ]. This is to say that political ideology is a phenomenon that does not exist separately from personality but that it emerges as the result of individuals holding certain values and convictions, which at least partially arise from and correspond to differences in personality.

Scholars have consequently been able to provide much evidence of personality differences between individuals of different political leanings. They have shown, for instance, that liberals tend to exhibit higher cognitive complexity [ 40 ] and lower need for cognitive closure [ 41 , 42 ]. Furthermore, such personality characteristics have been found to translate into differences in actual every-day behavior outside the political sphere, both in information systems use [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 34 , 43 , 44 , 45 ] and in areas as diverse as lifestyle choices and purchase behavior [ 25 , 46 ], management practices [ 47 , 48 ], and interpersonal relations [ 49 , 50 ].

Specifically, prior research has demonstrated that political ideology is closely linked to the traits of openness to experience [ 51 , 52 ] and conscientiousness [ 25 , 52 ]. Individuals that subscribe to a more conservative ideology also tend to possess comparably lower levels of openness to experience and higher levels of conscientiousness. They are, in other words, typically less inclined to try new things, exhibit lower aesthetic sensitivity, tend to have less complex personalities, be more conventional and less creative (i.e., exhibit less openness to experience), as well as usually more diligent and achievement-oriented, more self-disciplined, and more organized and careful (i.e., exhibit greater conscientiousness) [ 53 ].

Both traits, in turn, are closely associated with a variety of behaviors. Openness to experience is linked, for example, to certain preferences that lead to conscious choices of music [ 54 ] or sports [ 55 ] as well as to unconscious consequences such as language style selection in speech [ 56 ]. Conscientiousness predicts a host of consequences as well, ranging from, for instance, college students’ time spent in class to their use of swear words [ 57 ].

There are two key mechanisms that link dispositions rooted in personality with observable behavior. First, personality traits come with specific attitudes that comprise affective, cognitive, and conative aspects, which tend to make individuals behave in a trait-consistent, dispositional way in a given situation [ 58 ]. In addition, personality traits tend to influence individuals’ choice of situations, leading to individuals typically opting for situations which are consistent with their personalities, further encouraging the expression of trait-consistent behavior [ 59 ].

Based on these ideas, we thus hypothesize that the traits of openness to experience and conscientiousness are also associated with pirated online media consumption. In particular, we argue that people high in openness to experience, i.e., people with a less conservative worldview, are more likely to seek out opportunities to and actually do engage in online media piracy because they are more inquisitive and more unconventional, and thus more likely to try new things, even when they might be illegal [ 10 ]. People high in conscientiousness, i.e., more conservative individuals, in contrast, are less likely to engage in online media piracy because they ascribe greater importance to order and diligence and thus avoid and disapprove of behavior that may be considered to involve breaking rules [ 10 ].

In fact, prior research has already established first linkages between both traits and attitudes towards online media piracy. Specifically, Brown and MacDonald [ 10 ] showed among other things that individuals who have more positive attitudes towards online media piracy also tend to score higher on openness to experience due to higher ratings on the factors of creativity and inquisitiveness. Such individuals may, thus, consider online media piracy as a novel and exciting way to consume media content. Conversely, these authors found that individuals who exhibit more negative attitudes towards online piracy tend to score higher on conscientiousness because they typically have higher ratings on the facets of being organized and diligent. A perception of online media piracy as an unorderly activity that is reckless and irresponsible may explain their more negative attitudes towards it.

Combining our theoretical arguments made above, we propose that the personality structure of more conservative individuals makes them use all types of online media piracy, i.e., pirated online streaming and file sharing, less than more liberal individuals. Of course, in arguing this, we are making the additional assumption that users can distinguish websites that provide pirated content from those that make legitimate content offerings. Given that websites offering pirated material usually offer an extraordinary wealth of content at zero cost to the users, which must seem ‘too good to be true,’ we deem this assumption reasonable. Formally, we thus hypothesize:

Hypothesis 1a

An Internet user’s degree of conservatism is negatively associated with his or her use of pirated online streaming websites.

Hypothesis 1b

An Internet user’s degree of conservatism is negatively associated with his or her use of pirated file sharing websites.

2.2 Political ideology, ambiguity intolerance, and the consequences for different types of online media piracy

Beyond its links to openness to experience and conscientiousness, political ideology has a particularly intimate relationship with the trait of ambiguity intolerance. This is evident from a number of studies that link ambiguity intolerance to conservatism [ 26 , 27 , 28 , 60 , 61 , 62 ]. Individuals with greater ambiguity intolerance tend to exhibit a higher motivation to seek certainty, tend to prefer familiar and clearly defined situations, and are more inclined to quickly establish assessments and conclusions [ 46 , 63 ]. Consequently, they have, for example, usually specific preferences regarding literature [ 64 , 65 ], art [ 66 ], and music [ 67 ]. They also typically perceive ambiguous situations as more threatening and are therefore more motivated to avoid them [ 26 ]. Ambiguity intolerance is also expressed in the degree of cognitive rigidity in thinking [ 68 ]. Specifically, conservatives tend to be stronger categorizers, i.e., perceive the world in more clearly defined and dichotomous “black and white” categories, whereas liberals tend to be more accepting of “different shades of grey” [ 69 ] and have a higher inclination to think in terms of probabilities [ 70 ].

We argue that the interplay between a technology’s ambiguity and potential users’ ambiguity intolerance has substantial consequences for technology use. Previous research appears to be compatible with this notion, linking ambiguity to the use of, for instance, new farming technology [ 71 ] and entrepreneurial innovation [ 72 ].

Specifically, we extend prior ambiguity research on online technology use, in particular with regard to the use of technologies that may be used to infringe copyrights, and reason that conservatives and liberals differ in their use of such technologies. We propose that, other things equal, conservatives tend to avoid using online technologies of ambiguous perceived legality whereas we expect no such tendency regarding technologies that are clearly legal or clearly illegal. Existing research on political ideology demonstrated that differences in ambiguity tolerance actually translate into behavior, especially with respect to which items individuals prefer to possess or use. For example, scholars found that more conservative individuals tend to have a greater preference for the unambiguous, simple, and familiar rather than the ambiguous, complex, and unfamiliar across a wide array of areas, e.g., in literature [ 64 , 65 ], art [ 66 ], and music [ 67 ].

Our selected empirical context of pirated streaming and file sharing technology is particularly well-suited to examine the effects of ambiguity [ 73 ]. Due to the rapid pace of innovation in digital content sharing, the social and economic ramifications of such innovation are often not immediately clear. This is especially the case with regard to potentially arising copyright issues, to which lawmakers and courts can typically only react with substantial delay, resulting in a time lag until all ambiguities and interpretation issues have been resolved [ 36 ]. This leaves both copyright holders and media consumers in a state of uncertainty because current rules and regulations may not be applicable to new technologies by simple analogy. As a consequence, such ambiguity in law and enforcement may substantially impact individuals’ actions.

In fact, the perceived legality of some content sharing technologies currently remains ambiguous for the end user in the U.S. Whereas distributing and downloading copyrighted material is clearly illegal under U.S. law, pirated online streaming is currently generally legal for the end user (though not for the platform operator) [ 74 ]. However, the U.S. government has strongly pushed for changes in legislation to criminalize online streaming in recent years. While proposed bills such as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) were not passed due to strong public opposition and have been placed on hold in 2012 [ 24 ], the government has been reviving its efforts to ban pirated streaming of copyrighted material [ 23 ]. As a consequence, the legality of pirated online streaming is generally not clear to the general public [ 23 , 24 ]. In fact, a brief Google search conducted by the authors revealed that users’ perceived ambiguity regarding the legality of streaming is high, as is evident from heated discussions among Internet users in online forums, blogs, and Q&A sites. The legal situation, at least from a layperson’s perspective, for pirated online streaming thus remains convoluted. The legal situation for file sharing, in contrast, is unambiguous.

We argue that, other things equal, the use of online services differs depending on the perceived ambiguity of the services’ legality and on users’ political ideologies. Specifically, we propose that conservative-leaning users are less tolerant of the ambiguity around pirated online streaming and are thus less likely to use it than are liberal-leaning users. Pirated file sharing’s legal status, however, is unambiguous, and we therefore expect to find a smaller difference between users of varying political ideology. We thus advance the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2

The association of an Internet user’s degree of conservatism with the use of pirated online streaming websites is more pronounced than the association with his or her use of pirated file sharing websites.

3 Methodology

We test our hypotheses using clickstream data. Clickstream data has become an important data source in Internet research, as it has several advantages over traditional data sources such as surveys or experiments. First, as we track actual behavior of the subjects, we avoid self-report biases such as the consistency motif, social desirability, or priming effects [ 75 ]. Second, as clickstream data collection is very unobtrusive, we can assume that we capture genuine behavior [ 76 , 77 ]. Third, we are able to minimize temporal behavioral biases through a longitudinal data collection, as we collect the clickstream data over a period of six months.

The clickstream data we use in this paper is derived from a panel of web users maintained by comScore, a U.S.-based market research firm [ 77 ]. The users in the panel were incentivized to participate and provided informed consent regarding the collection of their browsing behavior. Our initial dataset comprises 17,097 individuals from 9933 households in the U.S. Their Internet activity on their home computers was tracked for six months from March until August 2014. This timeframe follows prior work [ 33 ] and was selected to ensure reasonable temporal proximity to the 2012 U.S. presidential elections, the results of which were used to determine the political slant of online news websites that we employed to infer users’ political ideologies (see the following section for details). After removing all individuals from the dataset who did not meet the criteria for the measurement of political ideology (an average of at least four page views per month on relevant news websites), our final sample consists of 3873 individuals from 3361 households.

3.2 Measuring Political Ideology

We follow Graf-Vlachy et al. [ 33 ] and measure political ideology using an unobtrusive approach. Specifically, we use a scale developed by Flaxman et al. [ 34 ], which employs information on individuals’ news media consumption to infer their political ideologies. Such an approach is tenable since empirical evidence shows that political preferences of news media outlets are typically closely aligned with those of their audiences [ 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 ]. Flaxman et al. [ 34 ] approximate the political orientation of the top 100 news outlets by assigning a “conservative share” based on the fraction of their readership that had voted for the Republican candidate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election (see Appendix 1 ). This allows the construction of an unobtrusive measure based on actual behavior, i.e., online news consumption, which sidesteps many of the issues from which self-report measures suffer [ 75 ].

We approximate the political ideology of the individuals in our sample by calculating a weighted average conservative share of the online news outlets they visited in the six-month observation period. Weighting is performed using the relative page views each news outlet accounts for. The formula below shows the calculation of political ideology for a given individual i , with w being an index over all 100 news websites for which political slant data is available:

We consequently measure political ideology on a scale from 0 to 1, with higher values indicating greater conservatism. To ensure the validity of our measure, we only include individuals who regularly consumed online news and therefore, in line with Flaxman et al. [ 34 ], we limit our sample to individuals with, on average, at least four page views per month on these news outlets.

We validated our political ideology measure by comparing our distribution to the one found in the sample of Flaxman et al. [ 34 ]. This comparison is appropriate and informative because our sample stems from a different data source and covers a different timeframe. We further compare our data to the voting records and exit polls of the 2012 presidential election. Both comparisons strengthen our conviction regarding the validity of the measure [ 33 ]. First, where Flaxman et al. [ 34 ] find 66 percent of users to have an ideology score between 0.41 and 0.54, we find 65 percent of our sample in that range. In addition, the ideological distance between two randomly selected individuals in their sample is 0.11 and 0.12 in our sample. Second, our measure indicates that liberals have a stronger representation in young age groups than conservatives, which is in line with the presidential election voting records [ 82 ]. We also find that liberals are more likely to live in metropolitan areas than are conservatives, which is in line with presidential election exit polls [ 83 ].

3.3 Measuring use of pirated online streaming and file sharing websites

We measure the use of pirated file sharing and online streaming websites using two binary variables indicating whether a given individual visited any such websites during the observation period. To identify relevant websites, we conducted a systematic search of all second-level domains in our sample that had at least 20 page views and which contained any of the following keywords: “stream,” “movie,” or “film.” We subsequently manually checked all resulting domains for relevance by visiting the corresponding website and retained only domains in our list that actually offered links to pirated file sharing or online video streaming of movies or television shows. In the cases where websites offered both services, we assigned them to the category that best described the majority of the website’s offering. Additionally, we performed an online search for “free online movies” and “free online TV shows” and thus added several additional domains to our list. In total, we identified 47 streaming and 39 file sharing domains (see Appendix 2 ).

3.4 Control variables

To prevent non-focal variables from confounding our result, we include a set of control variables into our regression models. Specifically, all regressions control for age, gender, annual household income, and Internet usage. Age is the focal user’s age in years, gender is the user’s self-reported gender. We included household income because it proxies for socio-economic status and education [ 84 ] and we measured it on an ordinal scale from 1 through 13, indicating household income brackets from below 15,000 US$ to above 250,000 US$. We further controlled for Internet usage, which was measured in brackets coded as 1 through 3, indicating less than 5 h, between 5 and 16 h, and more than 16 h per week, respectively. All data for control variables were provided by comScore.

4.1 Descriptives

Table 1 contains summary statistics and pair-wise correlations for all variables used in our analyses. To test for multicollinearity, we calculated the mean variance inflation factor, which at 1.01 is well below the suggested threshold of 10.0 [ 85 , 86 ].

4.2 Regression models

Since our dependent variably is binary, we use a logistic regression. The results are presented in Table 2 . Models 1 and 3 are the control models for H1a and H1b, respectively. Model 2 includes a negative and significant ( p  < 0.001) coefficient for political ideology. It thus provides support for H1a, suggesting that conservatives are less likely to use pirated online streaming services. Model 4 exhibits a negative but insignificant coefficient for political ideology ( p  > 0.05). It therefore suggests that there is no difference in the use of illegal file sharing services between conservatives and liberals, lending no support to H1b. However, the results of models 2 and 4, in tandem, appear to support the notion we advanced in H2 in that they suggest that the effect on political ideology is stronger for pirated online streaming than it is for file sharing.

To further corroborate our results, we ran additional bivariate probit regression models which allow to simultaneously predict both dependent variables in one single model (Table 3 ). We chose a probit model because there is no bivariate logit estimator. Model 5 is the control model, and Model 6 incorporates the two dependent variables of interest. We observe similar results as in the individual logistic regressions: The coefficient for political ideology is highly significant ( p  < 0.001) and large for the dependent variable of online streaming use, whereas it is not significant ( p  > 0.05) and comparably small for the dependent variable of pirated file sharing use. The findings from this additional regression analyses thus corroborate our findings.

5 Discussion

In our paper, we studied personality antecedents explaining differences in the use of technologies to access pirated online media content. In particular, we explored why usage differs with regard to two technologies that exhibit different degrees of perceived ambiguity of their legal status, specifically pirated file sharing and pirated online streaming websites. We built on prior political ideology research to hypothesize about the relationship between political ideology, openness to experience, conscientiousness, ambiguity intolerance, and technology use. To measure political ideology and the use of pirated file sharing and online streaming websites, we drew on clickstream data capturing actual user behavior, thereby alleviating concerns about various biases [ 75 ]. This is particularly relevant in our context as the sensitive and partially illegal nature of pirated media consumption might lead to untruthful responses in self-reports [ 10 , 87 ]. Our findings corroborate extant research which has shown that political ideology serves as an important predictor of behavior, in particular with regard to information systems [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 34 , 43 , 44 , 45 ].

Our research thus contributes to the online piracy literature [ 10 , 17 ] by offering a nuanced explanation for piracy on the grounds of users’ political ideology and associated personality traits. In crafting and testing this explanation, we advance beyond common knowledge and the simple stereotype that conservatives make less use of new technologies such as online media piracy websites. In particular, we use the concept of ambiguity intolerance, one of the core personality characteristics underlying political ideology, in our theorizing. We propose that such ambiguity intolerance does not only motivate conservatives to disapprove of ambiguity in areas such as literature [ 64 , 65 ], art [ 66 ], and music [ 67 ], but also has consequences for technology use. Heightened legislative activity around the criminalization of pirated online streaming, both past and present [ 23 , 24 ], increased perceived ambiguity surrounding this technology. We propose that more conservative individuals tend to perceive this ambiguity as a threat [ 26 ] and react by withdrawing from such situations. Their greater cognitive rigidity in thinking makes it harder for them to obtain a differentiated assessment of pirated online streaming but instead tends to make them resort to dichotomous “black and white” thinking and consequently avoid the use altogether [ 27 , 68 , 69 ]. This is in clear contrast to our findings on pirated file sharing where the legal status is unambiguous and where thus no differences in behavior between conservatives and liberals can be found. These findings complement and extend existing studies found in the literature on the link between openness to experience and conscientiousness and online media piracy. Brown and MacDonald [ 10 ] found a positive association between the two traits and attitudes towards online media piracy. While we, by proxy of political ideology, find the same association in unreported analyses, we highlight that this overall effect is driven only by the legally ambiguous form of pirated online streaming.

By extension, we contribute to the literature on technology and services use more broadly by conjecturing that the specific case of pirated media consumption examined in our paper might generalize. Technologies and services, especially new ones, can, after all, differ greatly in the degree of legal ambiguity they involve [ 35 ]. Our findings suggest that conservatives–due to their relatively lower ambiguity intolerance–may be generally less willing to engage with and use technologies or services that exhibit ambiguity, whereas there may be no difference in adoption between liberals and conservatives for those that are unambiguous. Thus, we propose that political ideology–and specifically the underlying trait of ambiguity intolerance–may more generally be another important personality-related antecedent of usage decisions [ 88 , 89 , 90 ]. While this notion is compatible with prior research, for example on the use of social media, which found that liberals are more likely to use such technologies [ 29 , 30 , 32 ], our study goes beyond it. This is because prior research did not explicitly compare technologies differing in their degree of ambiguity and did not explicitly relate adoption to the specific traits and social-cognitive motives underlying political ideology.

Our research also has implications for practice. On the one hand, the knowledge of individuals’ political ideology and subsequent online behavior allows firms to potentially address these individuals in a more targeted way when introducing new technologies or service offerings. We demonstrate that it would be possible for firms to make predictions about users’ personality traits and behavior from their browsing history using news consumption as a proxy. This goes beyond most of today’s web personalization measures, which rely on content choices actively made by users within the website or on demographics and that are thus usually unable to segment website visitors according to actual personality characteristics. Using political ideology as a personality proxy could allow firms to highly customize their offerings and messaging to specifically account for differences in the personality traits underlying political ideology.

We specifically suggest that ambiguity intolerance may inhibit technology use in the case of more conservative individuals, which has implications for firms’ communication with their prospective customers. Depending on a prospective customers’ ideology, firms might wish to individually adjust the balance between, for example, stimulating customers’ imagination regarding an offering’s benefits, and reducing ambiguity through clear messaging to alleviate possible adverse effects of ambiguity in purchasing decisions. Firms may also selectively enhance their offering, for instance by offering guarantees or free trials, for those customers considered to be especially prone to ambiguity intolerance.

Even more directly, our findings have implications for communication strategies of firms that are either hurt or profit from technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous. Companies that might wish to curb the use of an ambiguous technology (e.g., the holders of media rights whose content is illegally distributed on streaming websites), should consider addressing conservative and liberal users differently. Whereas conservatives are likely more sensitive to messaging highlighting potential legal risks, other communication strategies, like highlighting fairness concerns, might be more effective in communicating with more liberal audiences. Conversely, firms wishing to promote the use of (legal) technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous might wish to focus their communication efforts on more conservative users to alleviate their concerns about the legality of their services. Such politically targeted communication is feasible not only through the analysis of browsing history data, as mentioned above, but also because we know which audiences frequent which media outlets, so that advertisements or editorial content can be placed accordingly.

As any empirical research undertaking, ours has several limitations that present opportunities for further research. First, we base our measure of political ideology on a relatively novel methodology. While this measure doubtlessly has many benefits, most notably the possibility to unobtrusively collect observational data, it would benefit from further validation against traditional ideology measures. This is particularly the case as recent literature has identified problems in using behavioral online data as a replacement for survey data when making inferences about political behavior [ 91 ]. While we have no theoretical a priori reasons to suspect so, it would also be possible that the news consumption that people exhibit online may diverge from their offline news consumption with regard to the political orientation of the frequented news outlets. This could of course bias our data.

Second, we cannot fully rule out selection biases in our data. For example, our measure of political ideology is, by definition, only applicable to individuals who actually consume online news and signing up for the comScore panel may be correlated with a certain attitude towards privacy, and ultimately with political ideology. However, we are not aware of any specific theoretical reasons that would let us expect such a bias in the sample. Additionally, we cannot strictly rule out that high-intensity users of pirated online media might be underrepresented in the sample due to self-selection, or that included users’ behavior may be influenced by the fact that they know that their behavior is being tracked. However, comScore tracks panel members’ browsing behavior in a very subtle fashion, making it likely that members’ online behavior is not substantially affected.

Third, and closely related to both prior issues, our sample might be biased in other ways. Specifically, the number of individuals in our sample is reduced substantially when we remove all individuals for whom we cannot reliably calculate a political ideology score because they made insufficient visits to relevant news websites [ 33 , 34 ]. This reduction in sample size affects sample characteristics such as, for instance, the mean values of gender, income, and age. While these changes are statistically significant (which is to be expected in such large datasets), none of the observed changes were large in terms of effect size [ 90 ]. Nevertheless, the changes in sample composition raise the question of generalizability of our findings. Specifically, it remains unclear in how far our results hold in populations beyond people who are consuming online news. Future research might thus study the political ideology of Internet users that do not (or rarely) consume relevant online news and seek to replicate our findings in fully representative samples.

Fourth, potential limitations stem from our measurement of the use of pirated file sharing and streaming websites. For instance, it is conceivable that, despite our best efforts, we missed some websites that individuals in our sample visited and that served pirated material. Given our sample size and the overall number of unique domains visited, there appears to be no practical solution to arrive at a perfect selection in this regard. While we are inclined to believe that this possible imperfection will likely only introduce random noise (because the political composition of the users of a missed website is unlikely to be systematically different from that of other websites of the same type), we acknowledge that it could lead to bias. Relatedly, some websites provide both streaming and downloading functionality. While the main functionality of each website was clearly identifiable, our classification of each individual website may also be imperfect in this regard. Further, some users might not have been aware of the possibility to engage in pirated online media consumption altogether. Although we control for several variables that explain the awareness of this possibility (finding, e.g., positive effects of being younger and spending more time on the web on the number of visits to pirated media online media websites), such selection issues might potentially introduce bias into our analyses.

Fifth, as we do not measure openness to experience, conscientiousness, and ambiguity intolerance directly, we cannot empirically confirm that the variance in website use is indeed caused by these personality characteristics, and not by other characteristics related to the ideology measure. While we acknowledge the possibility, having reviewed the existing literature on political ideology, we could not identify different personality characteristics that were theoretically superior or would better account for our empirical findings. Nevertheless, future research might wish to study the precise mechanisms at play. It is, for example, conceivable that conservatives might subscribe to a different worldview than liberals in that conservatives might readily perceive everything that is not clearly and explicitly illegal as legal and normatively appropriate, whereas liberals might more strongly deliberate on the ambiguity of the situation and let other moral considerations enter their decision calculus. Future research might thus wish to explore such possibilities, potentially also using more fine-grained measures of ideology, for example separating out social and economic conservatism [ 92 ].

Lastly, since our measure and our sample are from the U.S., the generalizability of our findings to other countries or cultures might be limited. This limitation provides a particularly rich opportunity for future research, as the political landscape of other countries, e.g., in continental Europe, is much more diverse than the Anglo-Saxon two-party system, potentially allowing the use of political ideology as a proxy for other, more fine-grained personality characteristics.

In summary, our paper establishes differences in political ideology, and thus in openness to experience, conscientiousness, and ambiguity intolerance, as fundamental predictors of individuals’ online behavior in ambiguous contexts, specifically the adoption of technologies that differ in their lawfulness. We encourage scholars to further build on our results. For one, scholars could further validate the implications of ambiguity on technology use by studying ambiguity with respect to other types of technologies beyond website use and by measuring ambiguity in ways other than through political ideology. For another, we are confident that political ideology as an unobtrusive measure of underlying personality traits carries great potential for information systems research, and we thus urge other scholars to explore its consequences with regard to other personality traits and types of online behavior.

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Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at ECIS 2017 and appeared in the corresponding proceedings. We thank conference participants for their constructive feedback. We also acknowledge the helpful feedback from the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers. We thank Lena Kamp for copyediting support. Finally, this project benefitted from a collaboration with McKinsey & Company’s Global iConsumer Research Initiative.

Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

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Lorenz Graf-Vlachy

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ESCP Business School, 79 Av. de la République, 75011, Paris, France

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Tarun Goyal & Yannick Ouardi

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Graf-Vlachy, L., Goyal, T., Ouardi, Y. et al. The politics of piracy: political ideology and the usage of pirated online media. Inf Technol Manag 23 , 51–63 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-021-00341-9

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The Copyright Paradox: Fighting Content Piracy in the Digital Era

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December 1, 2001

The Internet has given rise to a puzzling copyright paradox. To hear the recording industry tell it, the copyright world as we know it is coming to an end. Between Gnutella and Napster-like sites, fans can easily exchange music files over the Internet, sending CD sales plummeting. Copyright law is powerless to halt the onslaught of Internet piracy, which will soon remove any economic incentive for creative activity.

At the same time, libraries, universities, and content user groups, voicing their helplessness before ever-strengthening copyright legal protections, insist that the content provider community is better positioned than ever to eliminate traditional user privileges. Historically, for example, the fair use doctrine has allowed academic users to reproduce without payment parts of copyrighted works for purposes such as criticism and classroom use. But, say these users, the new Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA), adopted by the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws in 1999, and the technological measures protected by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) will soon enable content providers to create the “pay-per-use” environment they have long sought.

Who’s Right?

At first blush, it would seem that the content providers and the content users-the Recording Industry Association of America and the libraries and universities (hereafter the library community)-can’t both be right. We can’t possibly be living in both the best of times and the worst of times for copyright protection. One of these two communities must be exaggerating.

Indeed, the available facts suggest that the recording industry may be overstating the harm caused by Napster and Gnutella. Although CD sales in record stores near university campuses have fallen (college students are among the biggest users of Napster and Gnutella), CD sales overall have grown 8 percent since last year. The group ‘N Sync recently broke the one-week record for CD sales, ringing up more than 2.5 million. Beyond these hard numbers, anecdotal evidence suggests that people sample music on Napster and then buy the higher-quality CD if they like what they hear. So Napster-like sites may actually spur CD sales.

Moreover, the content community seems to be on a winning streak. The recording industry secured a preliminary injunction against Napster (at this writing, the injunction was stayed pending appeal). A judge imposed the largest amount of statutory damages in copyright history-more than $100 million-on MP3.com. The major sports leagues shut down IcraveTV. And the motion picture studios won an injunction against DeCSS, software that unlocks the encryption protecting DVDs.

Still, there is no question that the Internet facilitates piracy by allowing the widespread dissemination of lawful copies with no degradation in quality. Further, technologies like Gnutella do not require a central server, as does Napster or a typical pirate web site, making it hard to detect infringers. In short, the Internet does seem to pose an increasing threat to providers of copyrighted content.

At the same time, technological measures like encryption or copy controls encoded in software will prevent a teacher from making digital copies of an article for classroom use, and the DMCA has banned devices that enable users to circumvent such measures. The net effect will be less fair use, and the de facto extension of the copyright term, as works remain technologically protected long after the copyright expires. (This assumes, of course, that the DMCA will survive the constitutional challenges now being mounted against it.)

Similarly, UCITA validates the enforceability of shrink-wrap licenses (which appear on software packages) and click-on licenses (which appear on screen and which users must click to install software or access a web site) and will accelerate their use to prohibit fair use by contract. The circuit courts are split as to whether such license terms are preempted by federal law, and it may take years for the Supreme Court to resolve the issue. And if the Supreme Court decides that federal law does not preempt such license terms, licensees will be at the mercy of the licensors.

Which brings us back to the copyright paradox: both the content community and the library community appear to have legitimate, yet opposite, concerns about the future of copyright in the digital era. The content community fears too little protection, the library community too much. How can this be?

Of Ends and Means

The paradox is rooted in a mismatch between the stated ends of the content community and the means employed to reach them. The content industries have responded to the threat of Internet piracy by pushing for more legislation, such as the DMCA and UCITA. But although new legislation is the most expedient response to the threats posed by new technologies, it probably will not hinder Internet piracy because the problem with piracy is not the inadequacy of existing laws, but the high cost of enforcing any law against the large universe of infringers. Each of the hundreds of millions of computers attached to the Internet is a potential distributor of unlawful copies. Although of limited use against this large universe of potential individual pirates, the new legislation ensnares the libraries-the most public of our institutions.

The following examples demonstrate the disparate impact of UCITA and the DMCA. A software firm markets a CD-ROM subject to a shrink-wrap license that prohibits the further distribution of the CD-ROM or its contents. If a consumer acquires the CD-ROM, copies it onto his hard drive, and e-mails it to a dozen friends, the publisher is unlikely to find out about the breach of contract, much less prosecute it. If, however, a library acquires the CD-ROM and lends it out in accordance with copyright’s first-sale doctrine, the publisher almost certainly will sue the library for breach of contract. While the shrink-wrap license (validated by UCITA) cannot stop infringing activity by the consumer, it can stop otherwise legitimate lending activity by the library.

Similarly, the DMCA probably would not discourage a college student from finding a circumvention utility somewhere on the Internet and using it to elude the technological protection on his favorite CD so that he could make the sound recordings on it available to his friends. But the DMCA would prevent a library from acquiring the utility through legitimate channels to make a preservation copy permitted under Section 108 of the Copyright Act. The DMCA flatly bans almost all circumvention devices, even those capable of noninfringing uses. Put differently, the DMCA would do little to deter unlawful conduct, but much to deter conduct that is otherwise lawful.

In short, libraries (and other high-profile entities such as universities and large corporations) are likely to obey the laws and contractual terms that apply to them because they are law-abiding institutions and because they know they probably would be sued if they did not follow the law. In contrast, individual infringers are not likely to obey the law because they are not law-abiding and because they know they are unlikely to get caught. Seen in this light, the copyright paradox makes sense. Because the new laws do not meaningfully address Internet piracy, the content community remains vulnerable to piracy, but libraries are kept from engaging in historic library activities. The new laws also interfere with legitimate corporate activities. UCITA, for example, allows a software company to prohibit a business from selling copies of software when it sells a subsidiary even though copyright’s first-sale doctrine permits the transfer.

The logical next question is whether this discontinuity between means and ends, and the resultant collateral damage, is inadvertent or intentional. The charitable view is that the content community really believes that this legislation will help reduce piracy and has no intention of stifling library and educational activities. A more cynical perspective is that the content community pursued this legislation in part because it allowed the rollback of fair use, first-sale, and other user privileges the content community has always opposed. Indeed, conspiracy theorists believe that the libraries were the real target of the legislation, and Internet piracy served as a convenient pretext. Although generally I am not a conspiracy theorist, I am reminded of the following aphorism: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

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Protecting what we love about the internet: our efforts to stop online piracy

Nov 07, 2018

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The internet has enabled people worldwide to connect, create and distribute new works of art like never before. A key part of preserving this creative economy is ensuring creators and artists have a way to share and make money from their content—and preventing the flow of money to those who seek to pirate that content. Today, we're releasing our latest update on those efforts..

Our 2018 " How Google Fights Piracy " report explains the programs, policies, and technology we put in place to combat piracy online and ensure continued opportunities for creators around the world.

We invest significantly in the technology, tools and resources that prevent copyright infringement on our platforms. We also work with others across the industry on efforts to combat piracy. These efforts appear to be having an effect: around the world, online piracy has been decreasing , while spending on legitimate content is rising across content categories.

Here are a few of our findings from this year's Piracy report:

• $3 billion+: The amount YouTube has paid to rights holders who have monetized use of their content in other videos through Content ID, our industry-leading rights management tool .
• $100 million+ : The amount we’ve invested in building Content ID, including staffing and computing resources.
• $1.8 billion+ : The amount YouTube paid to the music industry from October 2017 to September 2018 in advertising revenue alone
• 3 billion+: The number of URLs that were removed from Search for infringing copyright since launching a submission tool for copyright owners and their agents.
• 10 million+ : The number of ads that were disapproved by Google in 2017 that were suspected of copyright infringement or that linked to infringing sites.

As we continue our work in the years ahead, five principles guide our substantial investments in fighting piracy:

Create more and better legitimate alternatives: Piracy often arises when it's difficult for consumers to access legitimate content. By developing products that make it easy for users to access legitimate content, like Google Play Music and YouTube, Google helps drive revenue for creative industries and give consumers choice.

Follow the money: As the vast majority of sites dedicated to online piracy are doing so to make money, one way to combat them is to cut off their supply. We prevent actors that engage in copyright infringement from using our ads and monetization systems and we enforce these policies rigorously.

Be efficient, effective, and scalable: We strive to implement anti-piracy solutions that work at scale. For example, as early as 2010, we began making substantial investments in streamlining the copyright removal process for search results. As a result, these improved procedures allow us to process copyright removal requests for search results at the rate of millions per week.

Guard against abuse: Some actors will make false copyright infringement claims in order to have content they don't want online taken down. We’re committed to detecting and rejecting bogus infringement allegations, such as removals for political or competitive reasons.

Provide transparency: We’re committed to providing transparency. In our Transparency Report , we disclose the number of requests we receive from copyright owners and governments to remove information from our services.

Today, our services are generating more revenue for creators and rights holders, connecting more people with the content they love, and doing more to fight back against online piracy than ever before. We’re proud of the progress this report represents. Through continued innovation and partnership, we’re committed to curtailing infringement by bad actors while empowering the creative communities who make many of the things we love about the internet today.

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Internet Piracy and How to Stop It

Online piracy is a huge business. A recent study found that Web sites offering pirated digital content or counterfeit goods, like illicit movie downloads or bootleg software, record 53 billion hits per year. That robs the industries that create and sell intellectual products of hundreds of billions of dollars.

The problem is particularly hard to crack because the villains are often in faraway countries. Bad apples can be difficult to pin down in the sea of Web sites, and pirates can evade countervailing measures as easily as tweaking the name of a Web site.

Commendably, the Senate Judiciary Committee is trying to bolster the government’s power to enforce intellectual property protections. Last month, the committee approved the Protect IP Act , which creates new tools to disrupt illegal online commerce.

The bill is not perfect. Its definition of wrongdoing is broad and could be abused by companies seeking to use the law to quickly hinder Web sites. Some proposed remedies could also unintentionally reduce the safety of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden put a hold on the bill over these issues, which, he argued, could infringe on the right to free speech. The legislation is, therefore, in limbo, but it should be fixed, not discarded.

The bill defines infringing Web sites as those that have “no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating” the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material in “substantially complete form” — entire movies or songs, not just snippets.

If the offender can’t be found to answer the accusation (a likely occurrence given that most Web sites targeted will be overseas), the government or a private party can seek an injunction from a judge to compel advertising networks and payment systems like MasterCard or PayPal to stop doing business with the site.

The government — but not private parties — can use the injunction to compel Internet service providers to redirect traffic by not translating a Web address into the numerical language that computers understand. And they could force search engines to stop linking to them.

The broadness of the definition is particularly worrisome because private companies are given a right to take action under the bill. In one notorious case, a record label demanded that YouTube take down a home video of a toddler jiggling in the kitchen to a tune by Prince, claiming it violated copyright law. Allowing firms to go after a Web site that “facilitates” intellectual property theft might encourage that kind of overreaching — and allow the government to black out a site.

Some of the remedies are problematic. A group of Internet safety experts cautioned that the procedure to redirect Internet traffic from offending Web sites would mimic what hackers do when they take over a domain. If it occurred on a large enough scale it could impair efforts to enhance the safety of the domain name system.

This kind of blocking is unlikely to be very effective. Users could reach offending Web sites simply by writing the numerical I.P. address in the navigator box, rather than the URL. The Web sites could distribute free plug-ins to translate addresses into numbers automatically.

The bill before the Senate is an important step toward making piracy less profitable. But it shouldn’t pass as is. If protecting intellectual property is important, so is protecting the Internet from overzealous enforcement.

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What the Online Piracy Data Tells Us About Copyright Policymaking

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I. Introduction

The question of whether piracy harms creators and consumers—and whether anything can be done about it—has been discussed in policy circles for centuries. These debates have heated up in recent years as Congress considers how to address the continued reality of online piracy.

Some organizations, including those aligned with technology companies that benefit from the proliferation of pirated content, take the position that piracy is essentially harmless to creators and consumers alike. Other groups strongly disagree, arguing that the harm from piracy reverberates throughout the creative ecosystem to the detriment of society. Such conflicting views can obscure the truth about online piracy from the view of policymakers, especially when they are presented with the veneer of plausibility.

While some advocates may favor ideology over evidence in assessing the impact of online piracy, policymakers who rely on unproven claims risk causing unnecessary harm to the marketplace for copyrighted works as well as to society. The problem for policymakers is exacerbated by the fact that both sides of the debate can offer perfectly reasonable theoretical arguments to support their positions.

Thankfully, policymakers do not need to rely on theories about piracy that are inconclusive and unhelpful; they can instead look at the empirical data . Economists and other academic researchers have been seriously studying the impact of online piracy for over two decades—since the early days of peer-to-peer filesharing with Napster. We now have plenty of high-quality, empirical studies from which to draw reliable conclusions for evidence-based policymaking.

This policy memo summarizes the peer-reviewed empirical research into the impact of online piracy on the marketplace for creative works, drawing heavily on similar reviews of the literature my colleagues and I have produced in papers, testimony, and book chapters. 1 As I will demonstrate in greater detail below, this academic literature leads to three broad conclusions that are particularly relevant to copyright policymakers today:

• First, digital piracy harms creators by reducing their ability to make money from their creative efforts.
• Second, digital piracy harms society by reducing the economic incentives for investment in creative output.
• Third, legislative interventions implemented worldwide have been effective in reversing these harms.

In short, with near unanimity, the peer-reviewed empirical literature confirms what many advocates for the creative ecosystem have been claiming for years, namely, that online piracy harms both creators and consumers. Moreover, this same literature demonstrates that policymakers can actually do something about it. By enacting legislative anti-piracy efforts that are appropriate in scope, policymakers can effectively reverse some of the harms caused by online piracy.

II. The Peer-Reviewed Academic Literature on Online Piracy

Policymakers seeking to understand and address online piracy can learn a great deal from empirical research published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Peer-reviewed publications are important because the peer-review process represents the gold standard in academic research. Peer review requires authors to convince journal editors and anonymous referees trained in the discipline that the article’s claims are accurate and trustworthy. This typically involves multiple rounds of revisions, with the most selective “A” journals accepting only a small fraction of submitted articles.

There are three main conclusions one can draw from the peer-reviewed academic literature on the impact of online piracy—conclusions that are broadly accepted among scholars doing research in this area. The first two takeaways from this empirical analysis match what for many is intuitively self-evident: online piracy harms creators because they make less money, and it likewise harms society at large because, with lower economic incentives to create, creators make and distribute fewer works for the public to enjoy. The good news for policymakers, and the third takeaway from the literature, is that the empirical evidence also shows that legislative directives aimed at protecting copyrighted works from online piracy can reduce these harms, benefiting the creative ecosystem and society as a whole.

A. Digital piracy harms creators by reducing their ability to make money from their creative efforts.

The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power “to promote the progress of science . . . by securing for limited time to authors . . . the exclusive right to their respective writings.” 2 The theory behind this constitutional provision is that copyright protections provide creators and rights owners with economic incentives to invest in making and disseminating new creative content. Copyright owners are given exclusive rights with which they can profit in the marketplace while preventing others from usurping those profits without permission. The Constitution thus predicts that the absence of legally enforceable rights will negatively affect the ability of creators to profit from their investments in creative output.

These legal protections are particularly important today where digitized works like films, books, music, television shows, and software can be reproduced and distributed online at near-zero cost. A straightforward application of economic theory predicts that digital piracy will significantly diminish the profitability of legal markets for these creative works. Again, this theory makes intuitive sense. After all, it is generally more difficult to convince someone to pay for something when it is available for free.

And, not only do these theories make intuitive sense, they are also consistent with the empirical evidence in the peer-reviewed academic literature. Specifically, as my colleagues and I documented in a 2020 piracy landscape study for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 3 there are 33 articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals that study whether piracy reduces legal sales (see Tables 1 and 2 below for a summary of these papers). Notably, 29 of these 33 studies find that piracy causes statistically and economically significant harm to sales in legal channels. These papers span music, television, books, and films; address both domestic and international markets; and have considered the sale of CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray discs, legal digital downloads, paid video streaming services, and theatrical box office revenue. These articles were written by 51 different professors at 36 different universities and include 10 articles published in the most prestigious “A” academic journals.

In short, there is a broad consensus in the peer-reviewed academic literature that online piracy does exactly what one would expect: it makes it harder for creators and rights owners to make a fair market return on their investments in content creation and dissemination.

B. Digital piracy harms society by reducing creators’ economic incentives to invest in creative output.

The flip side of the above question about the impact of online piracy on creators is the question of whether online piracy also harms consumers. The Constitution recognizes the logical connection between the two: Congress is empowered to grant exclusive rights to creators as an incentive for them to create and disseminate their works to the public because this in turn will “promote the progress of science” to the benefit of society by providing consumers with new creative works. 4 The constitutional theory behind copyright law is that the public interest is promoted by empowering creators to pursue their own private interests. If creators lack the proper incentives to make and disseminate their creative works, society suffers as a result.

Creators and rights owners invest substantial resources in terms of time, money, talent, energy, and risk to create the copyrighted works that benefit us all. For example, music labels may devote millions of dollars to break a new artist, Hollywood films regularly have production budgets of several hundred million dollars, and authors can spend years working on a single book. When creators and rights owners have limited opportunities to recover their initial investments, economic theory predicts that they will similarly have reduced incentives to create future copyrighted works. Here again, the economic theory matches the constitutional theory. Reduced creative incentives can cause significant problems for both creators and the broader society that benefits from their talents.

Moreover, the available empirical evidence is consistent with these theoretical predictions. Despite its logical relation to the question of harm to creators, the question of harm to consumers is harder to answer because it requires separating the impact of online piracy from the impact of other simultaneous technological changes that may skew the results. Consequently, far fewer articles have studied this particular issue. In fact, I am aware of only two published studies that attempt to separate these distinct effects.

Specifically, my colleagues Rahul Telang and Joel Waldfogel studied this question in a peer-reviewed journal article by analyzing the rise of VCR-based piracy in India. 5 Their article looks at the time periods before and after the introduction of the VCR led to VHS-based piracy throughout the country. They find that both Bollywood revenues and the number of Bollywood films increased before the VCR became widely available. Yet, after VHS-based piracy became commonplace in India, they find a corresponding drop in revenue, the number of movies produced by Bollywood studios, and the quality of the remaining movies as measured by IMDB ratings. These findings are consistent with the theory that by reducing creators’ economic incentives, piracy causes a sharp drop in both the number and quality of movies that otherwise would have been produced.

Brett Danaher and I took a different approach to analyze whether piracy impacts the supply of creative content in an article published in the George Mason University Law Review. 6 We note that while all countries experienced a surge in video piracy after the development of the BitTorrent protocol for peer-to-peer filesharing, the effect was more prevalent in some countries than others. Recognizing that it is difficult to produce a foreign film unless it will perform well in its local market, we asked whether domestic output of Academy Award–winning (or –nominated) films decreased in high-piracy countries after the introduction of BitTorrent, as compared to the change in Academy Award quality output in lower-piracy countries.

The data shows that this was indeed the case. Countries whose domestic markets were most harmed by piracy suffered precipitous drops in the number of award-winning films produced for those domestic markets, relative to much smaller or no changes in countries whose domestic markets experienced less harm from piracy.

Thus, there is significant empirical evidence in the academic literature that online piracy decreases the revenues available to creators of copyrighted works, and that this reduction in revenues has harmed consumers by reducing both the quantity and quality of creative output that would have occurred absent piracy.

C. A variety of anti-piracy interventions implemented worldwide have been effective in reversing these harms.

While it is clear from the empirical data that online piracy harms creators and rights owners by reducing their revenues, and that this in turn harms consumers because it reduces the quantity and quality of creative output, the question remains whether there are proven strategies that policymakers can use to reverse these harms. The good news for policymakers is that the empirical evidence shows that legislative efforts can make a significant difference.

The peer-reviewed academic literature has studied the impact of anti-piracy interventions in a variety of contexts, including demand-side actions like graduated response efforts and laws enabling easier enforcement against known pirates, as well as supply-side actions like notice-and-takedown regimes on search engines, the shutdown of pirate sites, and site-blocking efforts. One might argue that such interventions will have very little impact on consumer behavior since consumers can easily bypass these and other anti-piracy interventions by using virtual private networks (VPNs) or by visiting the remaining pirate sources. However, the empirical evidence (summarized in Table 3 below) tells a very different story.

Demand-side anti-piracy actions target the consumers of pirated content, usually with potential penalties or education efforts meant to dissuade them from illegal consumption. On this front, Brett Danaher and I found that the HADOPI graduated response law in France, which empowered rights owners to monitor internet traffic from French citizens for instances of copyright infringement, caused iTunes music sales to increase by 22-25 percent, even though consumers could use VPNs to avoid detection. 7 Similarly, Adrien Adermon and Che-Yuan Liang found that the IPRED law in Sweden, which made it easier for rights owners to pursue cases against pirates, “increased music sales by 36 percent during the first six months” after its passage, even though it too could be easily bypassed with VPN services. 8

Supply-side anti-piracy enforcement actions, by contrast, focus on websites that facilitate online piracy. In the context of notice-and-takedown efforts on search engines, Imke Reimers found that removing some, but not all, links to pirated ebooks from search results caused ebook sales to increase by “more than 14 percent.” 9 Similarly, Liron Sivan, Rahul Telang, and I found that eliminating links to pirated movies from the first page of search results “causes users who otherwise would have consumed infringing content to switch their consumption to paid legal content,” even though pirate links were readily available in search results beyond the first page. 10

In the context of site shutdowns, Brett Danaher and I found that shutting down Megaupload, the largest piracy cyberlocker in the world at the time, “caused digital revenues for three major motion picture studios to increase by 6.5-8.5 percent,” even though pirated copies for these same movies were readily available on a number of other remaining cyberlockers. 11 Likewise, Christian Peukert, Jörg Claussen, and Tobias Kretschmer found that shutting down Megaupload caused “an average increase of 47 percent” in box office revenues for the top ten percent of movies shown in theaters. 12

Finally, in the context of internet service provider–level site blocking, Brett Danaher, Jonathan Hersh, Rahul Telang, and I studied separate—and increasingly broad—instances of website blocks in the United Kingdom to determine whether obstructing more than one dominant channel of piracy increases the effectiveness of such efforts. X We found that it does. We first looked at blocking access to a single site, The Pirate Bay, and found that blocking access to just this site did not cause legal consumption to increase. Instead, consumers simply shifted to other, more readily available, piracy sites. However, when UK policymakers simultaneously blocked access to 19 pirate sites in 2013 and then an additional 53 sites in 2014, we found that those actions caused consumers to increase their usage of legal subscription services by 7-12 percent.

In short, our study found that consumer behavior changed only after a sufficiently large number of pirate sites were blocked, making it sufficiently inconvenient for erstwhile pirates to find new sources for illicit creative content.

Some may argue that government anti-piracy efforts are no longer necessary now that content is readily available in legal digital sales channels. This is not supported by the empirical evidence. The peer-reviewed literature has found that the availability of content in legal channels causes a relatively small decrease in piracy of that content. For example, my colleagues and I have found that iTunes availability resulted in only a 12 percent change in piracy of television content, 14 and we have likewise found that the addition of 1,520 catalog films to the iTunes store from 2011 to 2012 caused a similar 12 percent decrease in piracy of these movies. 15

Perhaps the strongest evidence that rights owners are limited in their ability to combat online piracy by making legal content more available comes from my study with Miguel Godinho de Matos and Pedro Ferreira. 16 We worked with a major multinational telecommunications provider to run an experiment in which a randomly selected subset of pirating households was given free access to a large subscription video on demand (SVOD) service containing a plethora of popular television shows and films.

We found that, in the presence of readily available illicit alternatives, consumers were unwilling to pay for the legal streaming service when their free trial expired. Our results show that, as a standalone strategy, using legal SVOD services to curb online piracy requires offering “copyrighted content much earlier and at a much lower price than those currently offered in the marketplace.” Such changes are likely to reduce industry revenues, which will in turn damage overall incentives to produce and distribute new creative content while curbing only a small share of piracy.

The main takeaway from the peer-reviewed academic literature on the impact of online piracy for policymakers is that the right legislative interventions can have a significant impact—one that lessens the harms of piracy to creators and consumers alike. This is true whether the interventions address the demand side of piracy by targeting consumers or the supply side of piracy by targeting providers. Moreover, the data shows that policymakers should not be deterred by the claims from some advocates that the availability of legal alternatives alone will solve these problems.

III. Conclusion

The peer-reviewed academic literature makes clear that online piracy harms creators and rights owners by reducing revenues for their creative works that are available in legal channels. It also shows that online piracy harms consumers and society at large because creators have less economic incentive to create the very works that benefit us all. The empirical data further shows that online piracy negatively impacts both the quantity and quality of the creative works that are available in the marketplace. This empirical evidence reflects the economic theory embedded in the Constitution—the best way to promote the public good with copyrighted works is to grant creators meaningful protections against unauthorized copying and distribution of their creations.

Likewise, and more important for policymakers, the peer-reviewed academic literature is clear that both demand-side and supply-side anti-piracy efforts implemented worldwide have been effective at reversing these harms by increasing the search and transaction costs necessary for erstwhile consumers to locate and access pirated content. While online piracy has a demonstrable negative impact on our creative economy and our culture since it disincentivizes creativity, the empirical evidence shows that concrete legislative steps can be taken to avoid some of this damage. The good news for policymakers is that they can confidently use government regulation to reverse these harms.

 See Brett Danaher et al., Piracy and Copyright Enforcement Mechanisms , Nat’l Bureau Econ. Res. (June 2013), https://www.nber.org/papers/w19150 ; Advisory Committee on Enforcement, Tenth Session , WIPO (Nov. 23-25, 2015), https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/enforcement/en/wipo_ace_10/wipo_ace_10… ; Brett Danaher et al., Copyright Enforcement in the Digital Age: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications , Commc’ns Ass’n Computing Machinery (Feb. 2017), https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/2/212432-copyright-enforcement-in-t… ; Brett Danaher et al., Piracy Landscape Study: Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy , USPTO (Mar. 20, 2020), https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USPTO-Piracy-Landsc… ; Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Copyright Law in Foreign Jurisdictions: How are other countries handling digital piracy? , Senate Judiciary Comm. (Mar. 10, 2020), https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/copyright-law-in-foreign-juri… ; Michael D. Smith & Rahul Telang, The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Era , WTO (Feb. 17, 2022), https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/trade-in-knowledge/enforcement… .

 U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8.

 Brett Danaher et al., Piracy Landscape Study: Analysis of Existing and Emerging Research Relevant to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Enforcement of Commercial-Scale Piracy , USPTO (Mar. 20, 2020), https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/USPTO-Piracy-Landsc… .

 Rahul Telang & Joel Waldfogel, Piracy and New Product Creation: A Bollywood Story , 43 Info. Econ. & Pol’y 1-11 (2018).

 Brett Danaher & Michael D. Smith, Digital Piracy, Film Quality, and Social Welfare , 24 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 923 (2017).

 Brett Danaher & Michael D. Smith, Gone in 60 Seconds: The Impact of the Megaupload Shutdown on Movie Sales , 33 Int’l J. Indus. Org. 1-8 (2014).

 Adrien Adermon & Che-Yuan Liang, Piracy and Music Sales: The Effects of an Anti-Piracy Law , 105 J. Econ. Behav. & Org., 90-106 (2014).

 Imke Reimers, Can Private Copyright Protection Be Effective? Evidence from Book Publishing , 59 J.L. & Econ. 411-40 (2016).

 Liron Sivan et al., Do Search Engines Influence Media Piracy? Evidence from a Randomized Field Study , 43 Mgmt. Info. Sys. Q. 1143-54 (2019).

 Brett Danaher et al., The Effect of Graduated Response Anti-Piracy Laws on Music Sales: Evidence from an Event Study in France , 62 J. Indus. Econ. 541-53 (2014).

 Christian Peukert et al., Piracy and Box Office Movie Revenue: Evidence from Megaupload , 52 Int’l J. Indus. Org. 188-215 (2017).

 Brett Danaher et al., The Effect of Piracy Website Blocking on Consumer Behavior , 44 Mgmt. Info. Sys. Q. 631-59 (2020).

 Brett Danaher et al., Converting Pirates without Cannibalizing Purchasers: The Impact of Digital Distribution on Physical Sales and Internet Piracy , 29 Mktg. Sci. 1138-51 (2010).

 Michael D. Smith, I Want You Back: An Empirical Analysis of the Interplay Between Legal Availability and Movie Piracy , 26 Int’l J. Econ. Bus. 199-216 (2019).

 Miguel Godinho de Matos et al., The Effect of Subscription Video-On-Demand on Piracy: Evidence from a Household Level Randomized Experiment , 64 Mgmt. Sci. 5610-30 (2018).

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• Digital Piracy Is Not a Victimless Crime

Digital Piracy Is Not a Victimless Crime - Essay Example

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Argumentative Essay: Should We Keep Online Piracy?

Do you believe we should keep online piracy? Seventy percent of people find nothing wrong with online piracy.(Miller) Do you think we should have law for piracy?Online piracy is the unauthorized reproduction or use of a recording, trademarked product, television programs,copyrighted books,and patented invention..The importance of this issue is that many people want to be able to keep getting access to music,movies, and tv shows for free. People who want to get rid of piracy want to get rid of piracy because it ruin people’s chances of making money, owning people products for free, and it messes up people’s chances of making money whose only living off revenue.The supporting arguments and facts of the opposing side is that getting rid of piracy will regulate every website to the regulations imposed by the government, it would be an increase in revenue for businesses because customers would not have no choice but to pay for things, and it will allow copyright owners to have the right to shut down any website who replicate their content. Many people believe getting rid…

In particular, online piracy is the only way you have at accessing products that are unavailable.Similarity, it is like trying to go buy something but unable to find it and getting it for free online.You can watch tv shows you miss when it came on tv with piracy.It allows you to find movies that you would not find in stores. That shows piracy is not really a bad thing and it should not be a law for it. Piracy is a good and helpful thing for some people it allows us to get access to free music and movies whenever we want to.The impact or affect online piracy has on American society is most people would rather get things for free instead of having to pay for stuff like movies,tv shows, and music. To me piracy isn’t a big of a deal. But do you believe piracy is a bad thing? Do you think we should have a law for…

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• How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

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3 Key Tips for How to Write an Argumentative Essay

General Education

If there’s one writing skill you need to have in your toolkit for standardized tests, AP exams, and college-level writing, it’s the ability to make a persuasive argument. Effectively arguing for a position on a topic or issue isn’t just for the debate team— it’s for anyone who wants to ace the essay portion of an exam or make As in college courses.

To give you everything you need to know about how to write an argumentative essay , we’re going to answer the following questions for you:

• What is an argumentative essay?
• How should an argumentative essay be structured?
• How do I write a strong argument?
• What’s an example of a strong argumentative essay?
• What are the top takeaways for writing argumentative papers?

By the end of this article, you’ll be prepped and ready to write a great argumentative essay yourself!

Now, let’s break this down.

What Is an Argumentative Essay?

An argumentative essay is a type of writing that presents the writer’s position or stance on a specific topic and uses evidence to support that position. The goal of an argumentative essay is to convince your reader that your position is logical, ethical, and, ultimately, right . In argumentative essays, writers accomplish this by writing:

• A clear, persuasive thesis statement in the introduction paragraph
• Body paragraphs that use evidence and explanations to support the thesis statement
• A paragraph addressing opposing positions on the topic—when appropriate
• A conclusion that gives the audience something meaningful to think about.

Introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion: these are the main sections of an argumentative essay. Those probably sound familiar. Where does arguing come into all of this, though? It’s not like you’re having a shouting match with your little brother across the dinner table. You’re just writing words down on a page!

...or are you? Even though writing papers can feel like a lonely process, one of the most important things you can do to be successful in argumentative writing is to think about your argument as participating in a larger conversation . For one thing, you’re going to be responding to the ideas of others as you write your argument. And when you’re done writing, someone—a teacher, a professor, or exam scorer—is going to be reading and evaluating your argument.

If you want to make a strong argument on any topic, you have to get informed about what’s already been said on that topic . That includes researching the different views and positions, figuring out what evidence has been produced, and learning the history of the topic. That means—you guessed it!—argumentative essays almost always require you to incorporate outside sources into your writing.  

What Makes Argumentative Essays Unique?

Argumentative essays are different from other types of essays for one main reason: in an argumentative essay, you decide what the argument will be . Some types of essays, like summaries or syntheses, don’t want you to show your stance on the topic—they want you to remain unbiased and neutral.

In argumentative essays, you’re presenting your point of view as the writer and, sometimes, choosing the topic you’ll be arguing about. You just want to make sure that that point of view comes across as informed, well-reasoned, and persuasive.

Another thing about argumentative essays: they’re often longer than other types of essays. Why, you ask? Because it takes time to develop an effective argument. If your argument is going to be persuasive to readers, you have to address multiple points that support your argument, acknowledge counterpoints, and provide enough evidence and explanations to convince your reader that your points are valid.

Our 3 Best Tips for Picking a Great Argumentative Topic

The first step to writing an argumentative essay deciding what to write about! Choosing a topic for your argumentative essay might seem daunting, though. It can feel like you could make an argument about anything under the sun. For example, you could write an argumentative essay about how cats are way cooler than dogs, right?

It’s not quite that simple . Here are some strategies for choosing a topic that serves as a solid foundation for a strong argument.

Choose a Topic That Can Be Supported With Evidence

First, you want to make sure the topic you choose allows you to make a claim that can be supported by evidence that’s considered credible and appropriate for the subject matter ...and, unfortunately, your personal opinions or that Buzzfeed quiz you took last week don’t quite make the cut.

Some topics—like whether cats or dogs are cooler—can generate heated arguments, but at the end of the day, any argument you make on that topic is just going to be a matter of opinion. You have to pick a topic that allows you to take a position that can be supported by actual, researched evidence.

(Quick note: you could write an argumentative paper over the general idea that dogs are better than cats—or visa versa!—if you’re a) more specific and b) choose an idea that has some scientific research behind it. For example, a strong argumentative topic could be proving that dogs make better assistance animals than cats do.)

You also don’t want to make an argument about a topic that’s already a proven fact, like that drinking water is good for you. While some people might dislike the taste of water, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that proves—beyond the shadow of a doubt—that drinking water is a key part of good health.  

To avoid choosing a topic that’s either unprovable or already proven, try brainstorming some issues that have recently been discussed in the news, that you’ve seen people debating on social media, or that affect your local community. If you explore those outlets for potential topics, you’ll likely stumble upon something that piques your audience’s interest as well.  

Choose a Topic That You Find Interesting

Topics that have local, national, or global relevance often also resonate with us on a personal level. Consider choosing a topic that holds a connection between something you know or care about and something that is relevant to the rest of society. These don’t have to be super serious issues, but they should be topics that are timely and significant.

For example, if you are a huge football fan, a great argumentative topic for you might be arguing whether football leagues need to do more to prevent concussions . Is this as “important” an issue as climate change? No, but it’s still a timely topic that affects many people. And not only is this a great argumentative topic: you also get to write about one of your passions! Ultimately, if you’re working with a topic you enjoy, you’ll have more to say—and probably write a better essay .

Choose a Topic That Doesn’t Get You Too Heated

Another word of caution on choosing a topic for an argumentative paper: while it can be effective to choose a topic that matters to you personally, you also want to make sure you’re choosing a topic that you can keep your cool over. You’ve got to be able to stay unemotional, interpret the evidence persuasively, and, when appropriate, discuss opposing points of view without getting too salty.

In some situations, choosing a topic for your argumentative paper won’t be an issue at all: the test or exam will choose it for you . In that case, you’ve got to do the best you can with what you’re given.

In the next sections, we’re going to break down how to write any argumentative essay —regardless of whether you get to choose your own topic or have one assigned to you! Our expert tips and tricks will make sure that you’re knocking your paper out of the park.

The Thesis: The Argumentative Essay’s Backbone

You’ve chosen a topic or, more likely, read the exam question telling you to defend, challenge, or qualify a claim on an assigned topic. What do you do now?

You establish your position on the topic by writing a killer thesis statement ! The thesis statement, sometimes just called “the thesis,” is the backbone of your argument, the north star that keeps you oriented as you develop your main points, the—well, you get the idea.

In more concrete terms, a thesis statement conveys your point of view on your topic, usually in one sentence toward the end of your introduction paragraph . It’s very important that you state your point of view in your thesis statement in an argumentative way—in other words, it should state a point of view that is debatable.

And since your thesis statement is going to present your argument on the topic, it’s the thing that you’ll spend the rest of your argumentative paper defending. That’s where persuasion comes in. Your thesis statement tells your reader what your argument is, then the rest of your essay shows and explains why your argument is logical.

Why does an argumentative essay need a thesis, though? Well, the thesis statement—the sentence with your main claim—is actually the entire point of an argumentative essay. If you don’t clearly state an arguable claim at the beginning of your paper, then it’s not an argumentative essay. No thesis statement = no argumentative essay. Got it?

Other types of essays that you’re familiar with might simply use a thesis statement to forecast what the rest of the essay is going to discuss or to communicate what the topic is. That’s not the case here. If your thesis statement doesn’t make a claim or establish your position, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board.

Example Thesis Statements

Here are a couple of examples of thesis statements that aren’t argumentative and thesis statements that are argumentative

The sky is blue.

The thesis statement above conveys a fact, not a claim, so it’s not argumentative.

To keep the sky blue, governments must pass clean air legislation and regulate emissions.

The second example states a position on a topic. What’s the topic in that second sentence? The best way to keep the sky blue. And what position is being conveyed? That the best way to keep the sky blue is by passing clean air legislation and regulating emissions.

Some people would probably respond to that thesis statement with gusto: “No! Governments should not pass clean air legislation and regulate emissions! That infringes on my right to pollute the earth!” And there you have it: a thesis statement that presents a clear, debatable position on a topic.

Here’s one more set of thesis statement examples, just to throw in a little variety:

Spirituality and otherworldliness characterize A$AP Rocky’s portrayals of urban life and the American Dream in his rap songs and music videos.

The statement above is another example that isn’t argumentative, but you could write a really interesting analytical essay with that thesis statement. Long live A$AP! Now here’s another one that is argumentative:

To give students an understanding of the role of the American Dream in contemporary life, teachers should incorporate pop culture, like the music of A$AP Rocky, into their lessons and curriculum.

The argument in this one? Teachers should incorporate more relevant pop culture texts into their curriculum.

This thesis statement also gives a specific reason for making the argument above: To give students an understanding of the role of the American Dream in contemporary life. If you can let your reader know why you’re making your argument in your thesis statement, it will help them understand your argument better.

An actual image of you killing your argumentative essay prompts after reading this article! 

Breaking Down the Sections of An Argumentative Essay

Now that you know how to pick a topic for an argumentative essay and how to make a strong claim on your topic in a thesis statement, you’re ready to think about writing the other sections of an argumentative essay. These are the parts that will flesh out your argument and support the claim you made in your thesis statement.  

Like other types of essays, argumentative essays typically have three main sections: the introduction, the body, and the conclusion. Within those sections, there are some key elements that a reader—and especially an exam scorer or professor—is always going to expect you to include.

Let’s look at a quick outline of those three sections with their essential pieces here:

• Introduction paragraph with a thesis statement (which we just talked about)
• Support Point #1 with evidence
• Explain/interpret the evidence with your own, original commentary (AKA, the fun part!)
• Support Point #2 with evidence
• Explain/interpret the evidence with your own, original commentary
• Support Point #3 with evidence
• New paragraph addressing opposing viewpoints (more on this later!)
• Concluding paragraph

 Now, there are some key concepts in those sections that you’ve got to understand if you’re going to master how to write an argumentative essay. To make the most of the body section, you have to know how to support your claim (your thesis statement), what evidence and explanations are and when you should use them, and how and when to address opposing viewpoints. To finish strong, you’ve got to have a strategy for writing a stellar conclusion.

This probably feels like a big deal! The body and conclusion make up most of the essay, right? Let’s get down to it, then.

How to Write a Strong Argument

Once you have your topic and thesis, you’re ready for the hard part: actually writing your argument. If you make strategic choices—like the ones we’re about to talk about—writing a strong argumentative essay won’t feel so difficult.

There are three main areas where you want to focus your energy as you develop a strategy for how to write an argumentative essay: supporting your claim—your thesis statement—in your essay, addressing other viewpoints on your topic, and writing a solid conclusion. If you put thought and effort into these three things, you’re much more likely to write an argumentative essay that’s engaging, persuasive, and memorable...aka A+ material.

Focus Area 1: Supporting Your Claim With Evidence and Explanations

So you’ve chosen your topic, decided what your position will be, and written a thesis statement. But like we see in comment threads across the Internet, if you make a claim and don’t back it up with evidence, what do people say? “Where’s your proof?” “Show me the facts!” “Do you have any evidence to support that claim?”

Of course you’ve done your research like we talked about. Supporting your claim in your thesis statement is where that research comes in handy.

You can’t just use your research to state the facts, though. Remember your reader? They’re going to expect you to do some of the dirty work of interpreting the evidence for them. That’s why it’s important to know the difference between evidence and explanations, and how and when to use both in your argumentative essay.

What Evidence Is and When You Should Use It

Evidence can be material from any authoritative and credible outside source that supports your position on your topic. In some cases, evidence can come in the form of photos, video footage, or audio recordings. In other cases, you might be pulling reasons, facts, or statistics from news media articles, public policy, or scholarly books or journals.

There are some clues you can look for that indicate whether or not a source is credible , such as whether:

• The website where you found the source ends in .edu, .gov, or .org
• The source was published by a university press
• The source was published in a peer-reviewed journal
• The authors did extensive research to support the claims they make in the source

This is just a short list of some of the clues that a source is likely a credible one, but just because a source was published by a prestigious press or the authors all have PhDs doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best piece of evidence for you to use to support your argument.

In addition to evaluating the source’s credibility, you’ve got to consider what types of evidence might come across as most persuasive in the context of the argument you’re making and who your readers are. In other words, stepping back and getting a bird’s eye view of the entire context of your argumentative paper is key to choosing evidence that will strengthen your argument.

On some exams, like the AP exams , you may be given pretty strict parameters for what evidence to use and how to use it. You might be given six short readings that all address the same topic, have 15 minutes to read them, then be required to pull material from a minimum of three of the short readings to support your claim in an argumentative essay.

When the sources are handed to you like that, be sure to take notes that will help you pick out evidence as you read. Highlight, underline, put checkmarks in the margins of your exam . . . do whatever you need to do to begin identifying the material that you find most helpful or relevant. Those highlights and check marks might just turn into your quotes, paraphrases, or summaries of evidence in your completed exam essay.

What Explanations Are and When You Should Use Them

Now you know that taking a strategic mindset toward evidence and explanations is critical to grasping how to write an argumentative essay. Unfortunately, evidence doesn’t speak for itself. While it may be obvious to you, the researcher and writer, how the pieces of evidence you’ve included are relevant to your audience, it might not be as obvious to your reader.

That’s where explanations—or analysis, or interpretations—come in. You never want to just stick some quotes from an article into your paragraph and call it a day. You do want to interpret the evidence you’ve included to show your reader how that evidence supports your claim.

Now, that doesn’t mean you’re going to be saying, “This piece of evidence supports my argument because...”. Instead, you want to comment on the evidence in a way that helps your reader see how it supports the position you stated in your thesis. We’ll talk more about how to do this when we show you an example of a strong body paragraph from an argumentative essay here in a bit.

Understanding how to incorporate evidence and explanations to your advantage is really important. Here’s why: when you’re writing an argumentative essay, particularly on standardized tests or the AP exam, the exam scorers can’t penalize you for the position you take. Instead, their evaluation is going to focus on the way you incorporated evidence and explained it in your essay.

Focus Area 2: How—and When—to Address Other Viewpoints

Why would we be making arguments at all if there weren’t multiple views out there on a given topic? As you do research and consider the background surrounding your topic, you’ll probably come across arguments that stand in direct opposition to your position.

Oftentimes, teachers will ask you to “address the opposition” in your argumentative essay. What does that mean, though, to “ address the opposition ?”

Opposing viewpoints function kind of like an elephant in the room. Your audience knows they’re there. In fact, your audience might even buy into an opposing viewpoint and be waiting for you to show them why your viewpoint is better. If you don’t, it means that you’ll have a hard time convincing your audience to buy your argument.

Addressing the opposition is a balancing act: you don’t want to undermine your own argument, but you don’t want to dismiss the validity of opposing viewpoints out-of-hand or ignore them altogether, which can also undermine your argument.

This isn’t the only acceptable approach, but it’s common practice to wait to address the opposition until close to the end of an argumentative essay. But why?

Well, waiting to present an opposing viewpoint until after you’ve thoroughly supported your own argument is strategic. You aren’t going to go into great detail discussing the opposing viewpoint: you’re going to explain what that viewpoint is fairly, but you’re also going to point out what’s wrong with it.

It can also be effective to read the opposition through the lens of your own argument and the evidence you’ve used to support it. If the evidence you’ve already included supports your argument, it probably doesn’t support the opposing viewpoint. Without being too obvious, it might be worth pointing this out when you address the opposition.

Focus Area #3: Writing the Conclusion

It’s common to conclude an argumentative essay by reiterating the thesis statement in some way, either by reminding the reader what the overarching argument was in the first place or by reviewing the main points and evidence that you covered.

You don’t just want to restate your thesis statement and review your main points and call it a day, though. So much has happened since you stated your thesis in the introduction! And why waste a whole paragraph—the very last thing your audience is going to read—on just repeating yourself?

Here’s an approach to the conclusion that can give your audience a fresh perspective on your argument: reinterpret your thesis statement for them in light of all the evidence and explanations you’ve provided. Think about how your readers might read your thesis statement in a new light now that they’ve heard your whole argument out.

That’s what you want to leave your audience with as you conclude your argumentative paper: a brief explanation of why all that arguing mattered in the first place. If you can give your audience something to continue pondering after they’ve read your argument, that’s even better.

One thing you want to avoid in your conclusion, though: presenting new supporting points or new evidence. That can just be confusing for your reader. Stick to telling your reader why the argument you’ve already made matters, and your argument will stick with your reader.

A Strong Argumentative Essay: Examples

For some aspiring argumentative essay writers, showing is better than telling. To show rather than tell you what makes a strong argumentative essay, we’ve provided three examples of possible body paragraphs for an argumentative essay below.

Think of these example paragraphs as taking on the form of the “Argumentative Point #1 → Evidence —> Explanation —> Repeat” process we talked through earlier. It’s always nice to be able to compare examples, so we’ve included three paragraphs from an argumentative paper ranging from poor (or needs a lot of improvement, if you’re feeling generous), to better, to best.

All of the example paragraphs are for an essay with this thesis statement: 

Thesis Statement: In order to most effectively protect user data and combat the spread of disinformation, the U.S. government should implement more stringent regulations of Facebook and other social media outlets.

As you read the examples, think about what makes them different, and what makes the “best” paragraph more effective than the “better” and “poor” paragraphs. Here we go:

A Poor Argument

Example Body Paragraph: Data mining has affected a lot of people in recent years. Facebook has 2.23 billion users from around the world, and though it would take a huge amount of time and effort to make sure a company as big as Facebook was complying with privacy regulations in countries across the globe, adopting a common framework for privacy regulation in more countries would be the first step. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg himself supports adopting a global framework for privacy and data protection, which would protect more users than before.

What’s Wrong With This Example?

First, let’s look at the thesis statement. Ask yourself: does this make a claim that some people might agree with, but others might disagree with?

The answer is yes. Some people probably think that Facebook should be regulated, while others might believe that’s too much government intervention. Also, there are definitely good, reliable sources out there that will help this writer prove their argument. So this paper is off to a strong start!  

Unfortunately, this writer doesn’t do a great job proving their thesis in their body paragraph. First, the topic sentence—aka the first sentence of the paragraph—doesn’t make a point that directly supports the position stated in the thesis. We’re trying to argue that government regulation will help protect user data and combat the spread of misinformation, remember? The topic sentence should make a point that gets right at that, instead of throwing out a random fact about data mining.

Second, because the topic sentence isn’t focused on making a clear point, the rest of the paragraph doesn’t have much relevant information, and it fails to provide credible evidence that supports the claim made in the thesis statement. For example, it would be a great idea to include exactly what Mark Zuckerberg said ! So while there’s definitely some relevant information in this paragraph, it needs to be presented with more evidence.

A Better Argument  

This paragraph is a bit better than the first one, but it still needs some work. The topic sentence is a bit too long, and it doesn’t make a point that clearly supports the position laid out in the thesis statement. The reader already knows that mining user data is a big issue, so the topic sentence would be a great place to make a point about why more stringent government regulations would most effectively protect user data.

There’s also a problem with how the evidence is incorporated in this example. While there is some relevant, persuasive evidence included in this paragraph, there’s no explanation of why or how it is relevant . Remember, you can’t assume that your evidence speaks for itself: you have to interpret its relevance for your reader. That means including at least a sentence that tells your reader why the evidence you’ve chosen proves your argument.

A Best—But Not Perfect!—Argument  

Example Body Paragraph: Though Facebook claims to be implementing company policies that will protect user data and stop the spread of misinformation , its attempts have been unsuccessful compared to those made by the federal government. When PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted a Federal Trade Commission-mandated assessment of Facebook’s partnerships with Microsoft and the makers of the Blackberry handset in 2013, the team found limited evidence that Facebook had monitored or even checked that its partners had complied with Facebook’s existing data use policies. In fact, Facebook’s own auditors confirmed the PricewaterhouseCoopers findings, despite the fact that Facebook claimed that the company was making greater attempts to safeguard users’ personal information. In contrast, bills written by Congress have been more successful in changing Facebook’s practices than Facebook’s own company policies have. According to The Washington Post, The Honest Ads Act of 2017 “created public demand for transparency and changed how social media companies disclose online political advertising.” These policy efforts, though thus far unsuccessful in passing legislation, have nevertheless pushed social media companies to change some of their practices by sparking public outrage and negative media attention.

Why This Example Is The Best

This paragraph isn’t perfect, but it is the most effective at doing some of the things that you want to do when you write an argumentative essay.

First, the topic sentences get to the point . . . and it’s a point that supports and explains the claim made in the thesis statement! It gives a clear reason why our claim in favor of more stringent government regulations is a good claim : because Facebook has failed to self-regulate its practices.

This paragraph also provides strong evidence and specific examples that support the point made in the topic sentence. The evidence presented shows specific instances in which Facebook has failed to self-regulate, and other examples where the federal government has successfully influenced regulation of Facebook’s practices for the better.

Perhaps most importantly, though, this writer explains why the evidence is important. The bold sentence in the example is where the writer links the evidence back to their opinion. In this case, they explain that the pressure from Federal Trade Commission and Congress—and the threat of regulation—have helped change Facebook for the better.

Why point out that this isn’t a perfect paragraph, though? Because you won’t be writing perfect paragraphs when you’re taking timed exams either. But get this: you don’t have to write perfect paragraphs to make a good score on AP exams or even on an essay you write for class. Like in this example paragraph, you just have to effectively develop your position by appropriately and convincingly relying on evidence from good sources.

Top 3 Takeaways For Writing Argumentative Essays

This is all great information, right? If (when) you have to write an argumentative essay, you’ll be ready. But when in doubt, remember these three things about how to write an argumentative essay, and you’ll emerge victorious:

Takeaway #1: Read Closely and Carefully

This tip applies to every aspect of writing an argumentative essay. From making sure you’re addressing your prompt, to really digging into your sources, to proofreading your final paper...you’ll need to actively and pay attention! This is especially true if you’re writing on the clock, like during an AP exam.

Takeaway #2: Make Your Argument the Focus of the Essay

Define your position clearly in your thesis statement and stick to that position! The thesis is the backbone of your paper, and every paragraph should help prove your thesis in one way or another. But sometimes you get to the end of your essay and realize that you’ve gotten off topic, or that your thesis doesn’t quite fit. Don’t worry—if that happens, you can always rewrite your thesis to fit your paper!

Takeaway #3: Use Sources to Develop Your Argument—and Explain Them

Nothing is as powerful as good, strong evidence. First, make sure you’re finding credible sources that support your argument. Then you can paraphrase, briefly summarize, or quote from your sources as you incorporate them into your paragraphs. But remember the most important part: you have to explain why you’ve chosen that evidence and why it proves your thesis.

What's Next?

Once you’re comfortable with how to write an argumentative essay, it’s time to learn some more advanced tips and tricks for putting together a killer argument.

Keep in mind that argumentative essays are just one type of essay you might encounter. That’s why we’ve put together more specific guides on how to tackle IB essays , SAT essays , and ACT essays .

But what about admissions essays? We’ve got you covered. Not only do we have comprehensive guides to the Coalition App and Common App essays, we also have tons of individual college application guides, too . You can search through all of our college-specific posts by clicking here.

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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