The Digital Intellectual Property Challenge Revisited : File-­Sharing and Copyright Development in Hungary

The challenge that illegal file-­sharing poses to legal criminalisation is addressed in this study. Nonetheless, the pretexts and reasons for the specific character of file-­sharing behaviour and norms in a community likely, to various degrees, correlate with the specifics in the legal regulation relating to a particular jurisdiction. Therefore, we argue for the importance of empirically studying both the legal development and the file-­sharing practices existing in parallel to the legal development within the domain’s specific jurisdiction. This study will elaborate quite extensively on the contemporary development and the status of copyright in Hungary. This is followed by a sample of Hungarian respondents to a survey on file-­sharing, which is then compared with a large set of global respondents in order to determine the specific character of the former sample — if such character is found