Software Piracy: A Moral Issue

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorUniversity, Master's February 2008

download word file, 1 pages 0.0

Some people pirate software without even knowing it, while others actually pirate software affecting the software industry worldwide. Although software piracy is illegal, it can be argued that it actually helps the software industry. Piracy causes the industry to lose money, discouraging them to continue to develop new software. The majority of people who feel that piracy helps the software industry are mainly pirates themselves who feel that they need to justify their actions. To put it plain and simple, the software industry, like any other industry, puts money into research and development in order to make a profit. As the old saying goes, it takes money to make money! By pirating software, you take away from the company's profit, and take away its incentive to keep producing new software titles. Just as stealing is a crime, so is software piracy. The issue over piracy is a highly controversial issue.

Never the less, software piracy should be stopped, or at least reduced, by strongly enforcing the law, or even making them more rigid. However, since software piracy on the individual level is extremely hard to detect, I believe that piracy rates will continue to climb until the software industry crashes and the whole computer data system will need to be reconstructed to cater to anti-piracy measures.