An Analysis of the Factors That Contribute to Intellectual Property Theft

Mary Hoffschwelle (faculty) History A new learning community consisting of two required general education classes, Tennessee History and Tennessee Science, is being offered for the first time at Middle Tennessee State University. This collaboration is catching the interests of non-major students who are sometimes nervous about taking a required science class and companion laboratory. The learning community also provides an opportunity for a pre-service teacher to conduct a science education research project. This project includes a series of collaborative and laboratory exercises which focus on Tennessee science such as earthquakes and industrial pollution, agriculture and food production, and energy from coal, hydro and nuclear processes. Additional topics include the making, drinking of, and the use of alcohols as fuels, evolution, and country music. Hands-on activities, case studies, experiential learning and debates are used to encourage and assist non-majors in the learning of Tennessee science, as well as Tennessee history. The development of the Tennessee Science course is a new product of the three year NSF grant Piracy of intellectual property is costly and one of the most highly destructive illegal activities facing creative industries in the United States and abroad. For every $100 of legitimate software sold globally, another $69 is pirated. To help analyze this problem, a survey was developed asking a range of questions that relate actual and future piracy factors that may influence an individual to illegally download digital files. The purpose is to find significant factors that contribute to computer and media piracy in students at Middle Tennessee State University. Business college students took the surveys and the results were analyzed using regression. The findings suggest that knowledge of methods of piracy and daily computer use were significant factors in actual piracy activity, with knowledge of the methods of piracy also a significant factor in future piracy activity. In addition, actual piracy activity correlated significantly to future piracy activity. Emotional stimuli may engage cognitive resources in order to interpret the emotional experience. Allocation of resources toward emotional stimuli would then leave the person with fewer resources, or less attention to devote to other tasks, like memory. In the present study, we showed participants four types of pictures: neutral, positive, negative, and arousing ambiguous. Then, a memory task was given, and accuracy was compared across the different types of pictures. The memory task was a reverse digit-span recall test. Participants watched four digits appear one at a …