Pirateria academică în rândul studenților din România
Rezumat
Abstract: This article treats a phenomenon that has become nearly impossible to stop due to the current technological and informational advances: online piracy. It defines piracy and copyright, focusing on academic piracy. The article examines the main potential causes, starting with an analysis of social context prior to the first copyright law, exploring the economic factors that contributed to the rise of piracy. One of these factors is the influence of monopolies within the book market that raised prices and made books hard to afford for the lower classes. This situation created an opportunity for the first “pirates” to emerge, as they are known today. Four specialized studies on piracy were examined: one study explored the reasons for software piracy in 2000, while the other three investigated academic piracy in universities in Portugal (2013) and Denmark (2023; 2024). The main goals of this article are to understand how widespread academic piracy is in Romanian universities and to analyze the information-seeking behavior of Romanian students during their research process. Upon the conclusion of the study, it was found that a significant percentage (75.2%) of students are aware of at least one of the piracy resources mentioned in the questionnaire, and 69.1% of the participants use the academic databases provided by the universities. While most students believe that these resources are easy to find and use, 29.6% responded that they are not sufficient for their research needs, and 44.3% indicated that they are sometimes useful. Over a third of the students surveyed (35.2%) use pirated resources as their first option, and many of them (58.7%) declared that they are unaware of the legal status of these pirate sites. In conclusion, the students’ awareness about the ethics and legality of the research is questionable and one of the main reasons for their use of pirating resources is the lack of legal options.
Bibliografie
Notă: Prezentul studiu este parte din cercetarea doctorală în curs întreprinsă de autor, având ca temă „Comportamente de informare și documentare ale studenților români”.
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