Software Piracy and Its EffectsProblem Identification and DescriptionCopyright laws are perhaps the laws that are most violated by individuals on a daily basis. This is because people may not be aware of these laws or because little is being done to enforce them. Additionally, some countries around the world do not have copyright laws. Software piracy is a violation of copyright law because data contained on the medium is copied to another medium without the consent of the software owner. When you buy software, you are not buying the content of the software and it is therefore not your property. Instead, one purchases the license to use the software according to the license agreement. Software companies invest a lot of time and money in creating software and the company depends on the sales of the software for its survival. If illegal copies of software are made, companies do not make money and could therefore be forced into bankruptcy. Software piracy can be compared to theft because one steals someone else's property and uses it without paying for it. Up to $13 billion is lost every year due to hacking, and in order to overcome these costs, the company is forced to increase the prices of its products. Brands are owned by their respected companies and they have the right to protect their properties. Understanding the IT context of IssueSoftware is contained on disk or CD-ROM. Hackers can easily copy software to disk by copying it from one disk to another. For CD-ROMs, you need a CD-ROM burner or you copy the contents onto a large hard drive and then onto a floppy disk. Some underground message boards (BBS) contain pirated software. A user who logs into one of these BBSs can download the full version of the pirate software provided they can also give something in return. On the Internet there are binary newsgroups such as alt.binaries.warez, WWW pages and FTP sites which also contain pirated software. On the Newsgroup, files are sent at the request of anonymous users. As a result, people with Internet access can grab these software for free. The person publishing the pirated software may be from a country that does not have copyright laws. These methods used in software piracy are difficult to stop because they are done over the Internet and between different individual forms. of paper......it is unlikely that a new copy protection will not be cracked. Too much copy protection could alienate legitimate consumers. So far, politicians haven't really looked deeply into the problem of software piracy and copyright, because they think there are bigger problems to solve. Once legislation is passed and people realize that software piracy is a crime, we may see a decline in software piracy. Dealing with other countries involves a lot of bureaucracy but also a committed government. It may be years before anything happens at the political level before the effects are felt. This has the best chance of resolving the problem in the long term. Technologically, the problem could only be solved in the short term, but implementation would be rapid. -72 CNN Computer Connection December 96 - January 97 PC Entire Magazine 96 Volume Reuters InfoWorld, Vol.19, No.6Reuters February 6, 97 Media Daily, January 30, 1997 Article on crackdown on