Ripped from the Headlines: What Can the Popular Press Teach us about Software Piracy?

Abstract

Technological advances have outpaced the development of laws and norms to govern their acquisition and use. Software piracy is an instance of unauthorized duplication where laws and norms are not agreed upon. Although many articles have been written around the issue of software piracy, few have taken into consideration social and psychological aspects of the process. One barometer of the social environment is media coverage. This paper presents a content analysis (including actual quotes) of the five highest circulating U.S. newspapers 1989-2004 as evidence of the prevailing social environment surrounding software piracy. We classified the rationales for and against piracy using Fiske's (1991) structures for social interaction and found that those who condone piracy mostly evoke authority ranking and market pricing models, whereas those who condemn piracy mostly evoke market pricing models. Furthermore, not all the rationales given for/ against software piracy fit neatly into Sykes and Matza (1957) neutralization framework. Shariffah Zamoon and Shawn CurleyLast Revised: January 31, 2006Page 2 of 50 IntroductionThe development of technologies has outpaced the development of laws and norms that regulate their acquisition and use. The unauthorized duplication of digital products is an instance of this problem. Digital products are information that "can be digitizedencoded as a stream of bits" (Shapiro and Varian 1999, p.3). Digital products are compact, portable, and can be used virtually anywhere. However, the unauthorized duplication of digital products has created a gray area in the ethical landscape, where some condone the practice as legitimate while others condemn the practice as outright theft. Software, as an instance of a digital product exemplifies this situation well.Software piracy is defined as any reproduction of software that is in violation of its licensing agreement. The very term expresses a moral position, that espoused by the software industry. According to this view, piracy is stealing, it is a crime, and it is unethical. This is also the position expressed by the movie industry in ads against downloading films, another digital product. As ads on some currently sold DVDs state in For example, according to Solomon and O'Brien (1991), piracy is blessed with high acceptance among at least some students and, e.g. : "nearly half of the students had never heard a faculty member speak against illegal copying…a quarter of the sampled students had heard a faculty member condone the copying of protected software" (p. 174). The moral ambiguity of software piracy is further highlighted by the research of Strikwerda and Ross (1992), Logsdon, Reid (1994), andGlass andWood (1996) who have shown that piracy is not viewed as an ethical issue by some. Individuals may approach duplication as a preference choice, with no principles, norms, or values being brought to bear on the decision (Glass and Wood 1996).Because there are no agreed upon standards or norms to govern the acquisition and use of software, ...

Consumer software piracy in virtual communities

“…Their enactments are motivated by their ideology and committing of the "offending act" -a violation of recognized and accepted social norms of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection -is based on a rational decision (Zamoon and Curley, 2008). The act is committed on the basis of their belief that harming a large software producer/organization for the benefit of a "poor" consumer who has little power against software pricing is the right action to take (Shoham et al, 2008).…”

“…When a virtual community guarantees anonymity, its members are free to debate their beliefs, share their life experiences, and post or upload content they consider valuable to group members and to themselves with minimal concern about being scrutinized by third parties. However, through such activities, content such as instructions on how to circumvent the license keys of protected software, and the sharing of unauthorized intellectual property can implicate community members in acts of software piracy (Goode and Cruise, 2006;Zamoon and Curley, 2008). Previous research has addressed the challenge that software piracy in virtual communities is far from a rational act by users who are aware of the risks, gains, and losses of using pirate software (Larose et al, 2005).…”