Choice Theory and Self-Control Theory

Choice Theory and Self-Control Theory

Choice Theory and Self-Control Theory

Introduction

Digital piracy was characterised as the illegal making a duplicate of digital items, software, digital articles, digital audio (including melodies and voice), and digital video for any other reason other than to backup without explicit consent from and compensation to the copyright holder. In particular, digital piracy had been illegal since the Copyright Act of 1976 that had been amended in the No Electronic Theft (NET) Act. These acts made the making a duplicate and circulation of digital media over the Internet a felony offense. These laws had made several court cases for pirating software, melodies, and videos from the Internet.

 

Control Theory

Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) General Theory of Crime, now renowned as self-control idea, is one of the most popular misdeed theories. The key constituent of their idea is reduced self-control. Low self-control is the time-stable individual distinction that regulates behavior. Individuals with reduced self-control are the probable outcome of ineffective or poor parenting practices early in life--before the age of eight. Specifically, parents that are not productive or reliable in forming an emotional attachment with their progeny will make the task of supervising their child's behavior difficult. The adversity of supervising the child's behavior decreases the probability that the parents will identify their child's deviant behavior. This will decrease the opening for parents to apply non-corporal penalty for deviant behavior. Thus, these individuals are more probable to favour straightforward and easy tasks; favour physical rather than mental activities; favour dodgy behaviors; favour to aim on themselves; and favour not to command their temper. That is, these individuals are probable to have reduced self-control and be more probable to disregard the long-run consequences of their conclusions for themselves and for others. With this disregard, reduced self-control manifests itself in several ways. One way is in the pattern of criminal behavior. For Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990), misdeed is an act of force or fraud that an individual chases to satisfy their interests. Crimes are attractive to those with reduced self-control because misdeed shares many of the characteristics of reduced self-control(Arneklev, 2007).

 For instance, misdeeds are dodgy, immediately gratifying, easy and straightforward to perform. Thus, reduced self-control should have a connection with digital piracy. That is, individuals with reduced self-control may not be able to delay purchasing their own exact duplicate of the digital media. The individual with reduced self-control is not probable to respect the believe in the authorising agreement between the creator of the digital media and the copyright holder. Digital piracy is not necessarily a physical act, piracy may supply a thrill. Given the ease of the Internet, digital piracy is straightforward and easy to perform. So far, the literature is supportive of Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) theory. Specifically, the majority of the empirical research indicated that reduced self-control has at least a moderate connection with criminal behavior. To date, two investigations have exactly examined and shown that reduced self-control--measured utilising self-reports and mother reports--remains relatively stable over ...