Abstract
Software piracy causes multibillion-dollar losses to the global computer industry annually. The following research paper presents causes of software piracy and its effects on the economy of both developed and developing countries and software development companies worldwide. The research paper discusses the role of people’s awareness in committing the breeches of privacy, the role of software prices, cultural differences between Western and Eastern nations and many other aspects, and the paper explains how all these causes influence the level of computer piracy in the world. The paper also speaks about the overall effect of illegal sales of different pirated software on the economic development in the world in general and the development of the computer industry and software companies around the world. In the last part, the research paper gives comments on the information regarding software piracy presented in the body of the research paper.
Keywords: software, software piracy, breach of copyright, computers, cybercrime, causes and effects of software piracy, intellectual property, and copyright infringement.
Introduction
Software piracy is “the illegal copying, downloading, sharing, selling or installing of copyrighted software (Karakaya and Ulutürk 60)”. Software piracy has been a serious problem since the development of personal computers (PCs) and various software packages to run them and to work and play on them. A big software development company usually invests millions of dollars in the development of a computer program, which then may be sold illegally by software pirates; as a result, the company-developer loses a great percentage of its profits because of computer criminals (Icove; Seger and VonStorch 39). That computer program may also be stolen by a competitor, which has not spent a dime on the development of the program (Icove; Seger and VonStorch 39). Computer piracy is one of several kinds of cybercrimes. “Cybercrime as a means of offending operates in white collar crime, economic crime, intellectual property infringement, telecommunications crime and in the civil jurisdiction. The common feature is the use of information technology (computers) in their commission (Cowdery 1).” There are different types of software piracy, for instance CD-R infringement (which is making pirated copies of software by using CD-R), softlifting (making illegal copies of licensed software for friends and relatives), uploading and downloading (uploading illegal copies of authorized software to the internet for others to download or downloading such copies from the internet), hard disk loading (installing illegal copies of software on the hard disk for personal use) and several other types (Aladdin 1-2). As it is a crime, there are certain disciplinary measures against it; nevertheless, the threat of imprisonment does not frighten computer pirates who continue to sell software illegally online and through other ways. Therefore, people “either buy the software or copy it from a user who may also have either purchased the soft-ware or copied it from someone else (Givon; Mahajan and Muller 30)”. Consequently, software piracy is actually stealing, but it is different from traditional kinds of …