According to overly agressive anti-piracy adverts, thieves are readily identified by their hooded tops, sneaky demeanour and bags with the word 'loot' written on the side.
Not so fast with the assumptions. You could be a digital thief without even knowing it.
If you have uploaded someone else's photo to your Facebook page or blogged something written by someone else without asking, that could be considered theft.
So too are tweeting details of a super injunction, slamming someone in social media or sharing music without permission.
Every day, normal law-abiding citizens steal other people's digital property without realising it. And as we all know from Midsummer Murders/Morse et al, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Accidental Outlaw is a new site to help you detect just how much of a dastardly digital bandit you are.
The site was set up after people used social media to break super injunctions this summer, and says it is responding to the ever greater number of people blogging and sharing content online.
A study of more than 2,000 people by Knowthenet found that only 44% of people could pick out a libellous tweet about a celebrity, or decide what an incitement of violence on Facebook was. Errors were highest amongst people between 14 and 21.
Phil Kingsland, site director at knowthenet.org.uk, said: “In the past year we’ve seen many cases of people being convicted for offences committed online and, whilst there are those who set out to deliberately break the law and get punished, there are many others who could find themselves in trouble without realising they were doing anything wrong.”
Top five ways we break the law online are:
1 Uploading copyrighted content - photos, song lyrics, guitar tabs etc. to a personal website or social network
2 Blogging – misuse of copyrighted material and plagiarism
3 Privacy – by discussing or publishing details of a super injunction
4 Defamation – of other people using social media
5 Uploading and downloading – of music illegally
Take the test and tell us how much of an accidental outlaw, a part-time pirate, and an internet intruder you turn out to be.