An Analysis of Consumers’ Attitudes and Behaviors towards Pirated Products

The costs of product piracy towards knowledge creation and innovation are enormous. It hampers the development of knowledge and innovation because piracy can greatly reduce the economic benefits for the original creators of products and ideas. Widespread piracy and weak intellectual property regulations and enforcement, particularly in developing countries, will undermine development and the growth of local industry, and threaten local knowledge. In terms of the business enviornment, this can lead to loss of competive advantage because the measure of competitiveness among firms is driven by the firm’s ability to innovate and create new types of economic assets built from knowledge capital. If piracy is widespread, businesses are de-motivated to invest in R&D of new products/services since it will be difficult to recoup the high cost of these investments. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyse the consumer’s attitude in purchasing pirated products and their purchase intention. The finding of this research could help organizations in understanding piracy issues and consequently, enable them to have better knowledge in the formulation of anti-piracy strategies. Malaysian public universities’ students were used as sample since they constitute an important market segment of generation Y, that is, an emerging generation with powerful aggregated spending. The findings confirmed that novelty seeking factors have a significant influence on the tendency to buy pirated goods. The implications of this study and directions for future research are also discussed.