Jason Rutter & Jo Bryce
Cyberspace Research Unit, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE
Draft Prepublication Paper
Rutter, J. & Bryce, J. 2008. “The Consumption of Counterfeit Goods: ‘Here be Pirates?’”, Sociology, 42(6), pp. 1146–1164.
Abstract
Social science, policy and popular discourse around counterfeiting regularly position consumers of counterfeit goods as part of a technological elite or motivated by anti-capitalist or anti-corporate positions. In order to explore this construction and highlight its associated limitations, this paper presents quantitative data collected through postal and web-based questionnaires looking at the frequency, location and motivations for the purchase of counterfeit leisure items for consumers in the United Kingdom.
This report is the published summary of work we undertook on the consumption of counterfeit goods including digital games and internet piracy.
The publication details the background, empirical and analytical research undertaken during the Intellectual Property Theft and Organised Crime research project (IPTOC) and provides a robust insight into contemporary consumption of counterfeit/pirated goods and illegal downloading in England and Northern Ireland.
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The Digiplay games research bibliography is the largest database of academic and research articles on game freely available on the web. The Digiplay bibliography of computer games research has gone through several changes in its lifecycle. This version is the newest but still undergoing continual updating.
Fully integrated into this new Digiplay web site, the bibliography contains over 2700 references to papers, books, theses and conference papers on computer, video and digital games research. Multidisciplinary in nature, it includes references across the whole range of fields including sociology, psychology, computer science, education, literary studies, health sciences, economics, media studies, and law and so forth from 1949 to the present day.
All the references have COinS data associated with them, so that means that they are compatible with Zotero, the free Firefox extension which allows you to collect, manage and cite your research sources.
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The Digiplay Initiative is a research collective specializing in consumer research in the areas of digital games, adoption of technologies, online well-being and intellectual property crime. It undertakes commercial and academic research as well as providing online information services to the research community. Focusing closely on users we have developed a multi-discipline and multi-method approach to academic and commercial research. We explore the links between technology, innovation and consumer practice in order to get to the heart of consumer attitudes, motivations and change.
Our research, publications and presentations include:
As part of "Computer Games: Learning meaning and method" which took place at the London Knowledge Lab on 26th January Jason Rutter was invited to present on games research methods.
A new collection of essays from the Digiplay team aimed at digital games researchers and teachers is now available. Covering the study of digital games from business and design to culture and education the book provides and excellent source of current thinking in the field.
The Digiplay games research bibliography is the largest database of academic and research articles on game freely available on the web. The Digiplay bibliography of computer games research has gone through several changes in its lifecycle. This version is the newest but still undergoing continual updating.
The Digiplay Initiative is a research collective specializing in consumer research in the areas of digital games, adoption of technologies, online well-being and intellectual property crime. It undertakes commercial and academic research as well as providing online information services to the research community. 
