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In 1994, the Skandia Group was one of the first companies noted for their work with their intellectual capital. The present article is a case study of how their work has developed since then. It is mainly based on interviews with business controllers at Skandia AFS and on written material produced by the Skandia Group. The study shows that great efforts are currently being made at Skandia to replace the budget process with rolling forecasts and the Skandia Navigator. To support the organisation in this process, the Dolphin Navigator System, which is an Intranet‐based support system, is being developed and implemented. Opportunities and risks with this type of computer‐based support systems are identified.

This paper aims to uncover the influence of copyright holder/digital media policies on digital piracy behavior using the brand hegemony rejection (BHR) theory.

Content analysis of in-depth personal interview data from active digital pirates is analyzed using BHR theory.

BHR is found useful in understanding pirating motivations, which vary greatly across time and across digital mediums. Piracy is often motivated by profit enhancing policies of big media copyright holders, which are deemed unfair and not customer-oriented, but such motivations are greatly reduced when copyright holders offer attractive legal means to obtain digital content. Pirates generally do not feel sympathy for large media companies, but some pirates feel guilt that their actions may hurt digital content creators.

The relatively small sample of pirates is primarily from Norway and hence may not be representative of other media markets.

A large portion of digital piracy can potentially be eliminated if copyright holders are customer focused and offer desired content with a format and price that are deemed fair. The technical skills of pirates are high, and they can resort to piracy whenever they feel rights holders are not customer-oriented.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first application of BHR theory to the digital piracy arena, and it is found to provide useful insights in explaining the rise and fall of piracy. This application of the BHR theory also suggests it might be usefully applied to the study of other ethically questionable consumer activities.