Are Intelligent People Less Moral?

Digimarc.com sponsored a Neilsen study of book pirates, and offers a link to download the study.
https://www.digimarc.com/resources/ebook-piracy-study

It is a useful study.

Here's a link to another study: https://www.statista.com/topics/3493/media-piracy/

And another:
https://fossbytes.com/10-reasons-why-people-do-piracy-and-download-movies-shows-albums-software/

Perhaps it would not be so astonishing to learn that college graduates are more likely to feel that they have a right to circumvent the natural right of creators to earn a living from the creators' own work.

For one thing, college graduates are fresh out of education systems that enjoy limited copyright exemptions... and allegedly some institutions of higher learning encourage, facilitate and subsidize copyright infringement, including --according to an anecdote told on a news station-- by paying for wholesale photocopying of entire textbooks, so students did not have to purchase textbooks.

If my teacher does it, it must be okay. Right?

Most recent graduates, too, have grown up in an online world where piracy is the new normal. For instance, a certain venue for rampant pop-up music video piracy was founded on Valentines Day, 2005. Some musicians allege that the owner of this site makes them a take-it-or-leave-it offer of minimal income.

There are pop-up pirates on Google Sites, but to Google's credit, they make playing whack-a-mole quite easy.... but one has to play it almost daily.

Here's a pirate link that I have not yet bothered to report.  I do not recommend that you try to download it or subscribe to the site because no legal ebook or pdf or EPub copies of this work (Knight's Fork by Rowena Cherry) have EVER existed.

I made a conscious decision not to release this book in e-format, so I would know for sure that any site offering it for download is a pirate, likewise any ebay seller offering it on a CD is a copyright infringer.

https://sites.google.com/site/10m18y1/LokuHj7Gy4031

What kind of a name is "alpizar mabins"?  Three or four whacks ago, the mole was "Landrey Lebario".

https://sites.google.com/site/10m18y1/system/app/pages/recentChanges

Here's a trick with Google Sites. If you go to the bottom of the Google Sites page, you can see "recent activity" which reveals when and in what quantity this particular pirate has uploaded links to hundreds of books.  He's probably Russian judging by the " .ga " (Georgia) part of the "abbooks.ga " address you can see by hovering your cursor over the "Subscribe" link.

One would expect that the most intelligent people would ignore this sort of thing. Why subscribe, even if "subscribing" is free, when ebooks can be read free in myriad places?  Are those who infringe copyright absolutely confident in their virus protection software?

All the best,  (and in a rush tonight)

Rowena Cherry