Table of Contents
- Piracy is a Sign You Have a Good Product
- Educational Customers
- Online piracy - Good for Business
- Motivational Entertainment
- Criminal Advantage but Harm to Us
- Bibliography
The word Piracy assumes negative connotations. In the imagination of an ordinary middle class urban Indian it is linked directly to the informal economy, crime and even terrorism. But the ‘pirated good’, that is, the ‘optical disc’ is not seen with a similar perception.Till 2004, the creation of numbers conjuring losses up to millions was mostly the domain of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), which is now supplemented by reports commissioned to consultancy groups like McKinsey, PWC, and Ernst & Young.
Why has this form of illegal activity gained so much ground and why is it being fought back as hard as it is?
Some of the reasons for its huge spread may be:
Piracy is a Sign You Have a Good Product
If nobody pirated your software, it might mean you don’t have a very good product. Illegal use is a sign you have a product that people actually want to use. The amount of piracy surrounding your product can also tell you the amount of demand for it. The more people pirate your software, the more opportunity you have to sell it to legal users.
Educational Customers
Many many unlicensed users are actually students who don’t have access to educational versions of software because the distribution system to universities is often complex so students just download a crack.
Online piracy – Good for Business
Additionally, educational piracy often leads to start-ups that us illegal software at first but convert to legal use when the financial situation allows them or the vendor’s compliance team addresses the issue.
Motivational Entertainment
Niel Gaiman is a famous author of the books like American Gods or Stardust who now supports the ideas of sharing books and other kinds of arts. He was at first not happy to see his books floating around the internet, however he soon discovered that by this he was very quickly gaining lots of new fans. Nowadays when he is asked why he doesn’t mind his works being distributed for free, he replies with a question, Do you have a favourite author? And did you discover your favourite author by buying a random book or borrowing a random book? That is in fact how he sees sharing books in the internet as lending them and the exact same thing applies to music and movies.
Criminal Advantage but Harm to Us
As we know, criminals are also part of our society and piracy is very helpful to them in committing crimes. Pirating software is a crime that can be committed without leaving one’s house, or even interacting with any person. Thus, it is very tempting to commit this ‘victimless’ crime. But advantage to one part of our society can harm the other part ie. in spite of the above advantages of piracy, there are a lot of disadvantages too.
Piracy let one know demand of his/her product but, it also marks his/her loss as the one who owns that product does not get the amount he should be getting if someone uses that product.
Software piracy is the unauthorized installation or illegal copying of software. It affects everyone. Prices for software increase, because developers need to make a living. People who work with software also charge more to pay for the extra costs. These costs are passed on to the public, which pays more to benefit from what the software produces.
Movies and Albums do most of their earning in near time of its launch. But due to piracy there movies and albums get leaked out illegally either before launch or after few days of launch which hits the earning of industry.
Bibliography
- https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/piracy-studies-india
- https://www.itca.com/blog/4-positive-side-effects-of-software-piracy-for-developers
- https://artscolumbia.org/media-arts/benefits-of-piracy-45146/
- https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/1999-00/software-piracy/personal.html
