When Breaking the Law Gets You the Job: Evidence from the Electronic Dance Music Community
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why would a law-abiding occupational community support members engaged in legally prohibited actions? We propose that lawbreaking can elicit informal support when it is construed as a disinterested action—intended to serve the community rather than the perpetrator. We study how illegal remixing (“bootlegging”) affects an artist’s ability to secure opening act and other performance opportunities in the electronic dance music (EDM) community, whose members endorse the substance of copyright law but whose norms about bootlegging are ambiguous. Data on 38,784 disc jockeys (DJs) across 97 countries over 10 years reveal that producing bootlegs is associated with more opportunities to perform, compared to producing official remixes or original music. This effect disappears when community members view bootlegging as a self-serving action—primarily designed to benefit the perpetrator. An online experiment and an expert survey rule out the possibility that bootlegs are considered more creative, of higher quality, or better able to attract attention. We shed additional light on our proposed mechanism by analyzing data from 34 interviews with EDM professionals. This helps us to explain how a lawbreaker can paradoxically be perceived as serving the community, thereby eliciting active community support for their action.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it