Software Piracy is defined as the act of illegally using, copying or distributing a software without ownership or legally acquired rights. According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) report on piracy, despite the EULAs, over 36% of the software in use today are illegally acquired. Copyright laws are established to guarantee that the organization that invest time and money to develop application and software maintain the right to fully profit from its invention while contributing to the common knowledge bank. In light of that, wouldn’t piracy decriminalization be a better alternative to the current laws in protecting that core ideology? [1]
Over 46% of American are copyright pirates and with the emergence of P2P sharing networks that estimation sky-rocks to over 70% of young people between the ages of 18-29. Under the current copyright laws, can we realistically prosecute such a large portion of the population? If not is it really fair to hand pick and prosecute a few of them just to send a message? [2]
The principle of piracy decriminalization implies that software are design and distributed online for free and a surcharge tax is applied to the internet bill to serve as a compensation to the software owner. This approach has been tested and proven efficient in other service such us television services where an additional local TV surcharge tax is added to either the electric bill or cable bill based on local state laws and accordingly distributed to local TV channels.[3]
On software systems, such legislation will provide a peace of mind to the tool user who will be more efficient in knowing that he is operating under the law. It will also help avoid the 36% potential profit loss considering that all internet users will be obligated to pay for the software. And, since it’s paid for by the global population, the cost per individual will most likely decrease to a manageable range. [3] While decriminalization may appear to be a great solution to the issue of piracy, it comes with non-negligible concerns that will need to be taken in consideration.
The laws are meant to be the guardian of moral, ethical and good social behavior. They are meant to ensure that each individual within a society is treated fairly and that all people are treated equally. In that light, should we then legalize theft just because a large population within a given society have stolen? [4]
The principle of piracy decimalization first implies that every internet user is also a software user. Which in a sense could be accurate considering that the computer itself comes with preinstalled software and applications. However, computers or hardwares are not free. The preinstalled applications are part of the package already paid for by the owner, the issue is on the additional software that one may need in order to perform specific tasks. Since not everyone needs or will ever care to use these additional software, will it be fair to make everyone contribute to paying for them?
Moreover, it’s undeniable that not all software have the same value. Not all software required the same investment in development time and finance. And that is why, some software cost $.99 and others $2000+. If all software were to be piracy decriminalized and placed on the free market, the process of redistributing the taxes collected from the users back to the software owners would be quite ambiguous and most likely unfair. The drive to push software engineering to ground breaking innovation could die if that return of production investment was to be controlled by anything else than creativity and marketing abilities. [5]
The major issue with piracy, is not the user but the people and organizations who make it possible. The solution to the issue of software piracy should first and for most focus on establishing and enforcing tighter laws on the peoples and organization that provide the ability to download and “crack” pirated software. While it’s important to also educate and hold the larger body of user accountable for illegally using a pirated product, it will be more efficient to find and neutralize the smaller group that make it possible. Which could also raise other sets of ethical and legal issues on the nature of the oversight tool in itself.