[Cybernormer.se, Link] In 2011 we at the Cybernorms Research Group decided to try an interesting way to deeper understand the file-sharing community. In cooperation with The Pirate Bay we did a study called “The Research Bay” targeting their user-base. The response was huge; 75.000 respondents and over 25000 open answers.
Today we are releasing that data to be openly searchable for all. Today we (kind of proudly) present The Survey Bay.
The data – which in some cases has been edited in order to protect the privacy of the respondent – is released under a CC-BY license, meaning that it can be used in any possible way as long as the Cybernorms Research Group (and when referred to in academic publications an article of ours covering a brief overview of the data) is mentioned properly. It is possible to search for certain topics, make comparisons and get output as basic graphs. There is also an option to comment or share the findings.
For instance, you can use our database to understand what people of ages 18-24 years, living in south-east asia and using a VPN service think about the future of filesharing or maybe get an insight of the opinions of female european file-sharers preferring to download TV-shows. Basically a lot of stuff can be done with the data, and we have no possibility to cover it all.
A couple of articles have already been written based on our findings; among them “The Pirate Bay users long for anonymity” and “Girls are not into The Pirate Bay or Bittorrent“, both posted on Torrentfreak – our partner in this release.
Some academic articles are already published. To mention some of them; Law, Norms, Piracy and Online Anonymity – Practices of de-identification in the global file sharing community (Larsson, S., Svensson, M., de Kaminski, M. Rönkkö, K. Alkan Olsson, J.; 2012);Studying Norms and Social Change in a Digital Age (de Kaminski, M., Svensson, M., Larsson, S., Alkan Olsson, J. Rönkkö, K.; 2013); Professionalization, Gender and Anonymity in the Global File Sharing Community (Svensson, M., Larsson, S. & de Kaminski, M.; 2013); On the Justifications of Piracy: Differences in Conceptualization and Argumentation Between Active Uploaders and other file-sharers (Andersson Swartz, J. and Larsson, S.; 2013). The main article, giving a good overview of the data and what should be referred to when the data is used, is still forthcoming: The Research Bay – Studying the Global File Sharing Community (Svensson, M., Larsson, S., de Kaminski, M.; 2014).
Forbes has already written a piece on today’s release, as have TechDirt and Softpedia. Please let us know if you find some nice way to use the data, and don’t hesitate to contact us if there are any questions.
