Software Piracy Essay -- History, Dan Sokol

Many years have passed since the first pirates emerged on the sea, but they still exist and have extended their scope of action. Meaning of the word ‘’pirate’’ has changed and now can be defined as the person who illegally makes a copy of someone’s property. Music, films, books and software on hard media can be pirated by consumers. According to Gopal and Sanders (1998 381) software piracy is the operation of simulating original software which is against the law for any purpose. Such illegal acts could seriously affect industry and society. For instance, losses of software industry profits because of piracy were $12.8 billion in 1993 (Austin American-Statesman 1994), it shows that a large number of software products were pirated. Therefore, piracy is a major problem for the advance of the software industry and consumers. This essay will cover causes and effects of software piracy. There are four main reasons why the piracy of software is easy and wid espread, economic development, legislation, reliability of pirated copies and consumer’s attitude. Software piracy has the intellectual impact on society and the financial effect on the industry. This essay also will provide the combat process and analyze some proposed solutions in order to determine the effective solution. The history of software piracy starts from 1975, when Dan Sokol, who was a member of Homebrew Computer Club, copied the version of the programming language BASIC (Leinss n.d.). Since then, piracy seems to have increased by years. For instance, Givon et al. (1995 29) state that 40% of software was pirated in the United States in 1995. However, as Gopal and Sanders (1998 381) inform the percent of illegal copies there, had risen to 70% in 1997. Italy and Spain had ... ... pirated copies and consumer’s attitude were chosen as the root causes. Software piracy problem caused by integration of these factors, for dealing with this problem all causes should be eliminated. Software piracy considered as a problem, because it has a harmful effect for industry and users. It was found that there were some attempts to avoid this issue, but none of them was totally effective. Software piracy is the long-term problem of software industry and solutions of it are very controversial. To reduce the rate of piracy government should think about the level of economy and new legislations, monopolies should experience other protection devices, and consumers should think more about consequences of their choice. However, market and society adapted to existing of software piracy, and piracy seems to be not always bad, because of some benefits for industry.