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Software Piracy and It's Impact on Social Welfare
From Bank of Estonia's journal "Kroon and Economy" (no 3, 2003)
you can find the article "Software Piracy and It's Impact on Social Welfare",
that should give a short and non-technical overview of the area.
Short description:
Software piracy involves usage, copying, selling and distributing computer programmes
without the permission of its producer. Software piracy is an illegal activity and in Estonia
the issues related to that area are regulated by the Copyright Act. Ever since the dawn of
wider spread of computers and computer software some 20 years ago piracy has been
considered to be one of the most crucial problems for the software industry. To protect
software against illegal copying numerous different technical solutions have been worked
out so as to enable eventual abolishment of software piracy or make it so costly that the
notion of using pirate software would vanish. Attempts to implement different anti-piracy
mechanisms have indeed been made, but time has shown that radical protection measures
are eventually abandoned. Therefore, this is a paradox which economists are trying to find
an explanation to – why do software makers not bar piracy of their products, even though it
is technologically fully practicable?
The objective of this article is to introduce some economic-theoretical reasonings to explain
why piracy can still exist. The author is not trying to substantiate or justify usage of illegal
software, rather to contemplate on the possible reasons as to why software companies or
the government do not take more serious steps to exclude it. |
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