Versatile Delinquents or Specialized Pirates? A Comparison of Correlates of Illegal Downloading and Traditional Juvenile Crime

While illegal downloading of copyrighted content from the Internet is a very common form of law-breaking, it has attracted relatively little attention among criminologists. Using the Finnish Self-Report Delinquency Survey 2012 (n = 4,855), the current study analyses the overlap between traditional juvenile crime and intensity of illegal downloading, and examines the determinants of illegal downloading in light of control theories. Despite the fact that the majority of youths download, the intensity of downloading has a strong positive association with other forms of delinquency. Measures of self-control and parental social control emerge as significant predictors of frequent downloading.