Assessing audience’s willingness to curb digital piracy: A gender perspective

Abstract Rising incidences of piracy in the entertainment/creative industry in Nigeria are increasing concerns about the sustainability of the industry and the livelihood of content creators. The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1) aims to end poverty at all levels and in all places by the year 2030, but this goal faces a challenge if personal and corporate investments of moviemakers are lost to piracy. Studies have shown that profit-seeking pirates are not the only ones who do damage to the industry, but end-users also share unauthorised digital contents. The purpose of this research is to investigate the connection between gender and willingness of the audience, who in this case are undergraduate students of a government-owned university in Lagos, to see piracy curbed. Multistage sampling was used to cluster the population into faculties and departments. A sample of 199 was selected purposively based on the respondents’ knowledge of digital piracy, and a 20-item questionnaire was used for data gathering. Using t-test to analyse the data, the result shows that there was no significant difference between the views of female and male respondents. Cohen’s d analysis also indicates that there is a negligible effect size. While respondents participated in digital file-sharing, they did not consider their stoppage of the habit relevant to curbing piracy in Nigeria. Hence, the study recommends proper enlightenment of end-users to understand their significant role in digital piracy.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
The purpose of this research was to investigate the connection between gender and willingness of the audience, who in this case are undergraduate students of a government-owned university in Lagos State, Nigeria, to see piracy curbed. It is no secret that the Nigerian entertainment/creative industry is one of the largest in the world with the potential of creating jobs for citizens and revenue for the government. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG 1) aims to end poverty at all levels and in all places by the year 2030, but the menace of digital piracy has further perpetuated poverty in the industry. This survey of 199 undergraduate students of the selected university in Lagos reveals that there is no significant difference in the views of females and males on curbing digital piracy in Nigeria. This paper contributes to the conversation on digital piracy by providing valuable result on audiences' willingness to see it controlled.

Introduction
The first of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 1) is to put an end to poverty in all its forms everywhere by the year 2030. Considering the impact of poverty on human societies, the goal aims to mobilise a concerted effort to combat it and improve the standard of living of people. One of the specific indicators of this goal is to ensure equal rights and access to economic resources that would allow all men and women to live above the poverty level (UN, 2015). The Nigerian entertainment/creative industry is an important avenue to provide thousands of people access to economic resources through employment. According to PWC (2017), the film industry was a significant part of the Art, Entertainment and Recreation sector that contributed 2.3% (N239 billion) to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Nigeria in 2016. The Federal Government has also projected that by 2020, the film industry will generate 1 USD billion in export revenue. Despite the potentials of the industry, however, piracy has significantly reduced the income accruable.
Creative works are mass-produced and distributed without the knowledge or permission of the original creators for financial gains (Oludayo & Okoro, 2017). Consequently, resources such as time and money invested in creating such works are lost to pirates whose only investment are usually cheap duplication and sales. The advent of the information communication technologies (ICTs), particularly the Internet, has further aggravated the rate of piracy since contents are now in the digital format and can easily be shared without respect for time and space (Belleflamme & Peitz, 2014). The inability to recoup investment due to piracy has been so devastating that in Nigeria, for instance, several artistes resort to public donations for medical treatments while several others end their careers in desolations and abandonment.
Digital piracy, which is the reproduction and distribution of unauthorised digital contents, its implications, and even measures taken and proposed to mitigate its damage have been examined by several researchers (Atanasova, 2019;Okonkwo, 2015;Penney, 2013;Zakir, 2003). Nevertheless, it has continued to grow at an alarming rate, costing industries and even governments millions of dollars (James, 2007;Ridwan et al., 2013). While significant attention appears to be focused on "professional" pirates who profit off the activity, less attention has been given to the audience and their roles in the process. First, the piracy business cannot be profitable without a willing audience who consume the materials, and second, the audience itself tend to participate in the piracy by sharing illegal contents.
Also, while attempts can be made to track pirates who profit off the act by tracing the sources of pirated contents and monitor websites, what strategies can be adopted to monitor users who tend to share digital contents merely out of interest? Unless this category is willing to stop the practice, demand will always seek out supply. Therefore, the problem this research seeks to investigate is the role audience play in perpetrating piracy and its disposition towards stopping. Considering the research outcome by Tjiptono et al. (2016) that females are less positively disposed to piracy than male, the research explores the gender perspective of the audience's participation in and disposition towards digital piracy.
This research is significant because while several studies have focused on commercial digital piracy (Penz & Stöttinger, 2005;Tjiptono et al., 2016), the paper provides a user's perspective to the battle against piracy, considering that the audience largely determines whether or not the battle can be won. Rather than examine audience's attraction to digital piracy like previous studies (Morris et al., 2009;Tjiptono et al., 2016), the study focuses on their willingness to stop it. The undergraduate students of a government-owned university in Lagos, Nigeria, constitute the audience evaluated in this study. The paper is subdivided into the seven sections, and they are the introduction, literature review, statement of the problem and hypotheses, method of study, result, discussion, conclusion and recommendation.

Literature review
The rapid development of technologies has been fuelled by the consistent attempt to make goods and services available to end-users in more time and cost-effective ways Usaini et al., 2018). Technology has continued to redefine the way products are consumed and also, to a large extent, the product itself . According to Blackburn et al. (2019), the technological revolution has enabled consumers to access digital contents like video streaming from anywhere on any Internet-connected device. Blackburn et al. (2019) report that video streaming subscribers have surpassed paid-TV subscribers globally as of 2018. The over 500 licensed online video portals and unprecedented consumer demand have pushed the industry into creating original contents at an exponential rate. Several economies have benefited from the technology-driven sectors. For instance, the creative and technology industry in the U.S. employed about 2.6 million workers and up to 229 USD billion in revenue was recorded annually by the U.S. economy. The technological growth is, however, not without its challenges; it has also resulted in the growth of digital piracy. Belleflamme and Peitz (2014) define digital piracy as "the act of reproducing, using, or distributing information products, in digital formats and/or using digital technologies, without the authorisation of their legal owners" (p. 1). The authors observe that one of the major challenges faced by creators of information products such as movies, books, music and software is the non-excludable nature of their work. This refers to the difficulty of excluding non-paying consumers from accessing the product. Producers/creators mostly respond to this undesirable access by under-producing, which is then considered insufficient by society. Consequently, intellectual property (IP) laws were introduced to exclude unauthorised access to information products legally.
Intellectual property law also addresses another major challenge of information products, which is nonrivalness (Belleflamme & Peitz, 2014). Nonrivalness means that a person's consumption of a product does not prevent another person from consuming the same product. This attribute is further crystallised by digital communications in which millions of people can consume a single product available on the Internet at the same time at no extra cost to the producer. Intellectual property laws aim to maintain a balance between the encouragement of innovation through a reward system and the diffusion of such innovation. Atanasova (2019) avers that copyright laws have always been influenced by new technologies, and digitalisation is the latest development to confront. The author observes that "sometimes technological change is so profound that it rocks the foundation of an entire body of law" (p. 16). Digitalisation has led to the interrogation of several concepts of the initial intellectual property law. For instance, originality has changed in connotation since a digital replica may not be less original than the master copy of the information product. Yet, both parties can possess them at the same time.
Digital piracy has been a major concern across several countries over the years. According to Ridwan et al. (2013), countries such as France, India, Britain and the United States have suffered an enormous loss as a result of digital piracy across several areas like CD and DVD, software, television, Internet, video, video games, and music. Considerable investments have recorded marginal profits due to the effects of piracy. According to Blackburn et al. (2019), research has revealed that streaming accounts for over 80% of piracy in the U.S. From the macroeconomic standpoint, the authors report that an estimated 29.2 USD billion loss of revenue is recorded annually by the U.S. due to global online piracy. Also, 230,000 to 560,000 jobs in the U.S. economy are lost to digital piracy. Cheng (2008) reports that the Association Against Audio Visual Piracy (ALPA) in France also complained about the alarming rate of illegal downloads of movies, which had dire consequences for the industry and investors. Again, the Motion Picture Association of America in 2005 claimed that India lost USD 186 million to digital piracy (MPAA, 2005). Nigeria is not exempted from the effects of digital piracy. According to the Director-General of the Nigerian Copyrights Commission (NCC), the country's economy witnessed an annual revenue loss of 3 USD billion due to piracy (Sahara Reporters 2019). The Director-General attributed the high rate of digital piracy to the global expansion of high-speed Internet and thousands of illegal streaming websites. He also advocated for proper legislation and enforcement to curb the growing trend.
Among the significant moves to curb global piracy was the establishment of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) in 1984. It was established as a private-sector coalition aimed at representing copyright-based industries in the United States of America concerning bilateral and multilateral engagements to protect copyrighted materials internationally (IIPA, 2009). The African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) was further initiated to integrate African countries into a product exchange scheme with the U.S., provided some standards of regulations and ensure protection criteria are met. In an October 2009 report, IIPA noted that several eligible countries for AGOA lacked enough capacity to significantly protect copyright (IIPA, 2009).
The IIPA report further stated that while Nigeria recorded some level of development in copyright, the country alone accounted for 63 USD million of over 331 USD million lost to software piracy in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the potentials and the exponential growth of the Nigerian creative industry, stakeholders have also lamented its impending fatality due to piracy (James, 2007). The Nigerian government is making slow progress in updating the Copyright Act and implementing the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Internet Treaties. However, a 2019 study still shows that Nigeria was among the world's top five countries that illegally stream the English Premier League games (IIPA, 2019). IIPA (2019) has further noted that the impact of piracy varies depending on the market available for a product. For instance, a movie produced in the English language can find appeal across a broad spectrum of global markets. In contrast, an indigenous language movie is likely to be limited to the environment in which it was produced. While piracy of the English language productions may not eliminate its profit because of the market size, the impact will be more substantial on its indigenous counterpart. This endangers the local economy and the livelihoods of local artists. IIPA considers this a significant factor in the growth of indigenous productions in Nigeria.
The effect of piracy on the livelihoods of participants in the movie industry is tending towards poverty, even as James (2007) notes that it is digging a grave that can kill investment and growth. Nwogu (2014) reports an interview with some leading actors and producers in the Nigerian film industry who lamented the impact of piracy on their business and livelihood. Some of them also claimed that the activities of pirates were impoverishing them. According to Okonji (2012), piracy puts people out of business and drains the economic gains of the nation. While the world focuses on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, which aims to eradicate poverty by providing equal opportunities for all people, attention should also be given to those whose opportunities are being taken away through piracy. Those who are employed currently in the creative industry may soon join the people under the poverty line if they cannot sustain their businesses. Belleflamme and Peitz (2014) consider it striking that piracy is no longer limited to criminals who engage in it for financial gratification -commercial piracy; it also extends into end-user piracy in which consumers are involved in the sharing of copyrighted products. While the motive of commercial pirates is clear, the authors wonder at the motivation behind the large scale of intellectual property laws violation by people who otherwise are law-abiding. They note that the emergence of digital technologies has significantly reduced the cost of illegal production and distribution of copyrighted materials, even at an enhanced quality. Morris et al. (2009) further explain that the Internet, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and person-to-person copying are some of the ways digital piracy is carried out. End-user piracy is demonstrated in the consumers' desire to copy at low cost or the unwillingness to pay for the product, causing them to prefer the copy to the original. In turn, the copyright owner is forced to reduce the cost of the original to make a sale. A low-profit margin consequently forces the copyright owner to reduce the quality or delay the release of subsequent products (Belleflamme & Peitz, 2014). Larkin (2004) observes that though much is said about combating piracy in Nigeria, it appears to be encouraged indirectly. The author explains this contradiction by stating that while piracy is highly feared as the killer of the Nigerian creative industry, many of the people complaining also privately or professionally consume pirate media. There is also the tendency for up and coming artistes to depend on existing networks used by pirates to promote their new music, just to turn against the same after achieving fame.
Empirical research was conducted by Morris et al. (2009) to determine the role that gender plays in predicting college student's willingness to participate in digital piracy. Participants were drawn through a convenience sampling technique from two universities in the Eastern and Southern USA. From the 585 respondents that had 55.6% female participation, the findings reveal that gender did not significantly relate to the respondents' willingness to participate in digital piracy. Another empirical study was carried out by Tjiptono et al. (2016) to investigate the gender perspective of what determined youths' attitude towards digital piracy. From the 282 students who were selected through convenience sampling from four major universities in Indonesia, it was discovered that males had a more positive attitude towards digital piracy than females.
The theory of reasoned action (TRA) posits that the likelihood of individuals to perform specific behaviour will be determined by their motivation (Glanz et al., 2008). The theory assumes that the best way to predict behaviour is to evaluate attitude towards that behaviour, which results in the behavioural intention-the most important determinant. Rawstorne (2005) explained that the theory was propounded by Fishbein and Ajzen as an improvement on previous theories, particularly in the conceptualisation and measurement of attitude. Instead of measuring attitude towards and object, Fishbein and Ajzen adopted the approach of measuring attitude towards a behaviour. The theory of reasoned action is useful to this study because it helps us to examine female and male respondents' attitude towards curbing digital piracy in Nigeria.

Methods
The research design adopted for this study was survey. The design enabled the researchers to collect information from a sample of participants through their responses to specific questions (Ponto, 2015). The quantitative survey was used as participants were given closed-ended questions with a defined range of responses to choose from. The research design also offered a way to explore and describe human behaviour (Singleton & Straits, 2009).

Sample and sampling procedure
The research was conducted in Nigeria; as revealed in the literature, Nigeria has a high rate of digital piracy incidences (IIPA, 2019). Scholars have also found that universities are conducive environments for digital piracy since they host a collection of youths who are usually technologically skilled . A government-owned university in Lagos was purposively selected for this research because of its wide attraction of students across the federation. Lagos State is a commercial centre of the country, where there is easy access to mobile connectivity and computer hubs.
Considering that the university has a student population of about 60,000 (Unilag, 2020), the multistage technique was adopted to select the sample. This technique is used to divide large populations into manageable stages that enhance the practicality of the sampling process (Stephanie, 2014). Wimmer and Dominick (2003) also explain that populations are narrowed down into clusters out of which samples are randomly selected. In this research, the survey was divided into a three-stage sequence with the students grouped into clusters at each stage. In the first stage, the student population of the university was grouped into a cluster of 12 faculties, and simple random sampling was used to select four (4) faculties out of the twelve (12). The selected faculties are the Faculties of Social Sciences, Engineering, Management Sciences, and Environmental Science.
In the second stage, the faculties were further narrowed down to departments. Hence, simple random sampling was used to select one department each from the four faculties. Consequently, one department each was selected from the Faculty of Social Science, Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Management Sciences, and Faculty of Environmental Science, respectively.
In the third stage, departments were narrowed down to a cluster of students based on their awareness of digital piracy and its implications. This time, purposive sampling technique was adopted to accommodate the recruitment of respondents based on the required knowledge. One of the issues typical of purposive sampling is the difficulty to secure a sampling frame due to the criteria for selection. Consequently, a sample size of 50 respondents was adopted for each department. The 50-respondent sample size for each department was achieved except for the Department of Accounting, where the number was short by one. Therefore, data were gathered from 199 undergraduate students of the government-owned university in Lagos.

Instrument
A 20-item questionnaire was used to gather information for the survey. All the questions were closed-ended, and they were categorised in three sections, with Section A containing demographic questions, Section B measuring the level of knowledge about digital piracy, and Section C focusing on behavioural variables.

Data analysis
The output from the questionnaire was analysed with t-test using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS).

Ethical consideration
Considering that the research required the collection of primary data, respondents were enlightened on the purpose, and use of the data to ensure that the research conformed to acceptable ethical standards and they voluntarily consented to participate. The instrument was also designed to be free of any personal identification of the respondents; hence, their anonymity was guaranteed. Again, due to the sensitive nature of the subject of this research, effort has been made to avoid disclosing the identity of the institution and specific departments surveyed in this report.

Result
This section presents the results of the survey that was conducted among undergraduate students of a government-owned university in Lagos State. The data are presented in percentage tables and t-test tables. As shown in Table 1, the 19-21 age group accounted for more than half of the participants, both for the female and male categories. Considering that the respondents were selected purposively, which meant that potential participants were screened based on their knowledge of digital piracy and its implications, the results show that more students in the 19-21 age bracket demonstrated the required knowledge than the other categories.
A further breakdown of the demographic details of the respondents reveals that the highest population of female participants were in Department 1 and Department 3. At the same time, male students made up the majority in Departments 2 as well as 4.
Respondents were asked about their participation in sharing digital contents through storage and retrieval devices. Table 2 shows that majority of them were positive that they collected movies with devices. With more than three-quarters of the respondents, female audience admitted to collecting digital contents (80.3%), followed by male respondents with 69.5%, being a combination of strongly agree and agree responses. By this result, majority of the respondents admitted to participating in end-user piracy. Table 2 further shows that the respondents appreciated Internet downloads because they were free, though male participants appeared to be more in favour of this by 76.9%, than their female counterpart that accounted for %59.4%. This result presents a motive behind the end-user piracy participation of the respondents. Considering that majority of them also confirmed that they collected digital contents with storage and retrieval devices, which is also free of charge, it is not surprising that cost-free Internet download will also be attractive to them.

Hypothesis 1
H 1 -Female audience are more likely to believe that digital piracy can be curbed in Nigeria than male audience Table 3 shows that there is no significant difference between female and male audiences believe that digital piracy can be curbed in Nigeria (t = 1.209,df = 197,p = 0.114,. The result reveals that male audience are not more likely to believe that sharing and downloading digital contents can be curbed in Nigeria (mean = 3.38) than the female audience (mean = 3.15). Cohen's d value (0.18) also shows that there is negligible effect size.

Hypothesis 2
H 1 -There is a likelihood that female audience will believe that a change in their habit can curb piracy than male audience. Table 4 reveals that there is no significant difference between female audience's believe that a change in their habit can curb piracy in Nigeria than the male audience (t = 0.721, df = 197, p = 0.236, one-tailed). The finding shows that male audience did not believe any more that digital piracy can be curbed if they stopped downloading and sharing unauthorised contents (mean = 3.24) than their female counterpart (mean = 3.11). Cohen's d value (0.10) also indicates that the effect size is trivial.

Hypothesis 3
H 1 -Female audience are more likely to suggest encryption of digital contents than male audience.
From Table 5, it can be seen that there is no significant difference between female audience's likelihood to recommend the encryption of digital contents to prevent piracy and male audience's likelihood to do the same (t = 0.092, df = 197, p = 0.464, one-tailed). The finding shows that male audience did not tend to recommend encryption of digital contents more (mean = 3.43) than their female colleagues (mean = 3.41). Cohen's d value (0.01) shows that there is minimal effect size.

Discussion
The study provided evidence to support the participation of consumers in the process of digital piracy and assessed the gender dimension of their willingness to see piracy stopped. If anything, there has been a consensus among researchers about the tremendous benefits of ICT, particularly the Internet (Amodu, Omojola et al., 2019;Blackburn et al., 2019;Usaini et al., 2018). Not only has technology transformed the way information is packaged, it has also changed the way it is consumed. Nevertheless, there is a need to ensure information products are protected so that the creators can benefit from them. Unfortunately, piracy has deprived several digital contents creators of such benefits. Though the Internet holds high potentials for the fulfilment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 1, which is to end poverty, by providing unlimited opportunities and level playing field for businesses, it also tends to impoverish through easy access to illegal digital materials. .593 Amodu et al., Cogent Social Sciences (2020) While studies have been conducted on constructs such as personal risk, susceptibility to interpersonal influence, and rationalisation as determinants of consumer digital piracy behaviour (Kos Koklic et al., 2016); on how to predict digital piracy behaviour (Taylor, 2012); and on consumers' digital piracy intention ; this study is unique in its focus on the willingness of consumers to see digital piracy stopped. As important as it is to find out what attracts consumers to piracy, it is valuable to determine how willing they are to desist.
The overall result of this study shows that there is no significant difference in the willingness of female and male respondents to see digital piracy cubbed in Nigeria. The outcome is not surprising considering it was also discovered that majority of the respondents engaged in peer-to-peer digital content sharing, and they did not consider their stopping the practice significant in cubbing digital piracy in Nigeria. The finding aligns with the result of Morris et al. (2009), who also confirm that a significant number of end-user piracy involves peer-to-peer file sharing. The authors also observe the unwillingness of consumers to pay for the contents they are pirating, and our study shows that more than three-quarters of males and more than half of females download digital materials from the Internet because they are free. The research by Tjiptono et al. (2016) also reveals that Indonesian youths were not bothered by the poor qualities of the pirated digital products in as much as they are free.
Our result implies that the potential income of content creators in the film industry may be considerably reduced among the respondents of this study. If this situation is obtainable among the remaining population of university students and other Nigerians, we can begin to imagine the level of damage that can be done to the industry. The contents that are shared cost money since every professional involved in the production is paid. Kunle Afolayan, a renowned movie producer in Nigeria, had only recouped N100 million out of the N200 million budget when his film, October 1, was released by pirates into the Nigerian market (PM News, 2015). Subsequently, the audience freely shared the movie through storage and retrieval devices. If situations like these are not arrested, they can impoverish movie makers.
If the respondents of this study did not believe in the possibility of curbing piracy in Nigeria, they might not see any reason to desist from it on a personal level. Tjiptono et al. (2016) suggest enlightenment as a means of dissuading youths from digital piracy. There is a tendency for individuals to believe that their content-sharing habits are isolated and would not make much difference. On a larger scale, however, the combination of all illegal sharing will have a significant impact on the industry.

Limitation of the study
The sensitive nature of the study and the criminality of digital piracy affected the number of participation. It also affected the disclosure of the institution and departments where the survey was carried out.

Conclusion and recommendations
The findings of this research show that females were more likely to share unauthorised digital contents, particularly movies, than males. This contradicts previous research result that males were more positive towards piracy . We, however, found that there was no difference between the beliefs of female and male respondents on their roles in curbing piracy or how piracy could be curbed. This result is consistent with the findings of Morris et al. (2009), which reported no difference in the attitude of males and females to digital piracy. Considering the impact of end-user piracy on the creative industry, this study recommends enlightenment campaigns on the implications of individual piracy habits when scaled up. This will help enhance the profitability of the industry and reduce potential poverty.