Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%.
The conclusion doesn't follow the study.
Threatening messages decrease piracy by women by over 50%, while increasing piracy by men by 18%.
So, unless there are three times as many male pirates as female, those messages are effective at reducing piracy.
That would not surprise me at all.
Don't have time to read the research paper linked by the article at the moment...
But isn't the research just looking at how people view the message and not "were you pirating stuff and now you're not?"