There is a lack of clarity in information systems research on which factors lead people to use or not use technologies of varying degrees of perceived legality. To address this gap, we use arguments from the information systems and political ideology literatures to theorize on the influence of individuals’ political ideologies on online media piracy. Specifically, we hypothesize that individuals with a more conservative ideology, and thus lower openness to experience and higher conscientiousness, generally engage in less online media piracy. We further hypothesize that this effect is stronger for online piracy technology that is legally ambiguous. Using clickstream data from 3873 individuals in the U.S., we find that this effect in fact exists only for online media piracy technologies that are perceived as legally ambiguous. Specifically, more conservative individuals, who typically have lower ambiguity intolerance, use (legal but ambiguously perceived) pirated streaming websites less, while there is no difference for the (clearly illegal) use of pirated file sharing websites.

信息系统研究缺乏明确哪些因素导致人们使用或不使用具有不同程度感知合法性的技术。为了解决这一差距，我们使用信息系统和政治意识形态文献中的论点来理论化个人政治意识形态对网络媒体盗版的影响。具体而言，我们假设具有更保守意识形态的个人，因此对经验的开放度较低，责任心较高，一般较少从事在线媒体盗版活动。我们进一步假设，这种影响对于法律上不明确的在线盗版技术会更强。使用来自美国 3873 个人的点击流数据，我们发现这种影响实际上只存在于被认为在法律上不明确的在线媒体盗版技术。具体来说，