Software Piracy: A Bane to Software Industry.

Software piracy is the unauthorized possession or duplication of computer software. When someone buys the software, they do not actually own it, but they own the rights to use the software according to the software publisher’s license. This license is intended to protect the rights of software developers and is enforced my copyright laws.

The widespread popularity of the software piracy is usually the cost. With the computer hardware getting cheaper day to day, a lot of people think that paying huge sums for software is unreasonable. Why would you want to pay hundreds of dollars for the software when you can buy it for a price of a CD. This leads to people buying pirated software or making copies from borrowed software and using it for their own need. All software comes with a license, where its main goal is usually to authorize activities that are prohibited by default by the copyright law. People buying this pirated software are sometimes aware of the illegalities and the consequences of it; still they resort to the act. They are not aware of the effect of piracy, which is not only on the software industry, but impacts jobs, tax incomes and the economy of every country which develops and markets the software.

Software piracy laws have been devised by most of the countries which develop and sell software. Most of these laws are not enforced and therefore they go unrecognized. Some laws are not stringent enough to make the people think twice about using or buying pirated software. Considering the cost of software piracy to the entire world, the effort to take action against this illegality is nominal. We as software engineers should be the first group of people to take a strong initiative to root out software piracy from the future world. It’s not easy to eliminate it completely, because of the varied type of people involved in it, from large scale companies to people privately writing CD’s.

So what kind of action should we take to stop software piracy? Apart from the laws and copyright acts which are meant to punish the criminals involved in this crime, we have to improve on the technological front too. Software piracy should incur immediate prosecution, and quick punishment. This way, prospective software pirates will be discouraged from involving themselves. There should also be a control of the medium, in which modern software