Software Piracy Awareness, Policy, and User Perspective in Educational Institutions

Abstract

Software theft and piracy are rapidly ever-increasing problems of the present-day software industry. Software piracy is the illegal copy and use of software in a way other than that is officially documented by exclusive rights of the developer in the form of an individual or organization as described in the relevant sale agreement (license). Owing to the evolution in software development and Internet, software piracy has become a main concern for many software companies. Software companies are confronted with extremely high losses due to the piracy of software. Pirates achieve a lot of money by doing business with pirated software. General end-users of the software are not aware of this serious crime and of the legal consequences of breaking the law. Even most of the time, end-users and consumers think that it is none of their concern and not an important issue for them. Although, in reality, if an organization is working with pirated software, there is a risk of failure of the software, and it might put their organization at risk as pirated software does not receive any support from the development organization. This ultimately puts the consumer organization in huge financial loss. Due to these reasons, software piracy has turned out to be a major concern, more emergent due to the extravagant development of the software industry and the availability of software(s) on the Internet. In this paper, we analyzed and identified the ratio of software piracy, awareness regarding piracy, and the policy of the licensed software provided. Based on the results of the study, some suggestions are proposed by which the level of piracy can be reduced.