Abstract:
Academics are both owners and users of copyrighted material. Complex, vague, and ever-changing copyright law creates problems related to copyright for academicians and students who want to access works and digital products. It is important to increase the awareness of these individuals in order to prevent these problems. In this study, it is aimed to classify academicians and graduate students according to their awareness of the copyright of digital products. Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID), one of the Decision Tree (DT) algorithms, was applied to data obtained by questionnaire from academicians and graduate students working in different universities in Turkey. According to the findings of the DT models obtained, the most important variables that affect whether academicians and graduate students obtain digital products legally are found to be age, gender and level of computer use. 60.6% of academicians and graduate students and all those who are in the young age group and who can use computers at an advanced level use pirated software. Age-related concepts are Free Software and Copyleft, and the level of knowledge about these concepts is low. Most academicians and graduate students do not download cracking programs from the internet; do not use the work of others without attribution, and do not share their own licensed software with their friends. When it comes to copyright violations, younger people think that downloading content should be free, while most middle-aged and older people disagree. Although all academicians and graduate students think that the person who violates copyright does not care about social responsibility, academicians agree with this idea more than students. The reasons for copyright violations were determined as insufficient law/legislation, financial reasons and the belief that they would not be caught. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.