SOFTWARE PIRACY
IFSM 304

Abstract In the various media industries there are extreme worries concerning unauthorized downloading and copying of their products known as piracy. Piracy of items has been part of commerce for centuries; counterfeiting of currency for example. With the information age the ease at which media can be pirated has caused an explosion of this phenomenon. This practice is an illegal act that is done by individuals for personal use and also for profit. The first do not seem to see the issues caused by this practice such as; the spreading of viruses and lower quality products. We will use Reynolds' Seven-Step Ethical Decision Making Approach for the breakdown of the ethical reality of software piracy. …show more content…

To recoup some of these losses, the music industry has filed lawsuits against individuals who have been found to have illegally downloaded music. In some cases, individuals have been sued for thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Adkins, n.d.)

Stakeholders
There are a variety of stakeholders that are impacted in different ways by software piracy. Piracy affects the software developers, retail store owners, and the user. The illegal duplication and distribution of software has a significant impact on the economy, costing the United States billions of dollars a year in job losses, retail dollar losses, and governmental tax losses—money that would have gone back into local communities. (How Piracy Affects, n.d.) As we can see piracy affects everyone in one shape or another.
Guidelines
To make or download unauthorized copies of software is to break the law, no matter how many copies are involved. Whether you are casually making a few copies for friends, loaning disks, distributing and/or downloading pirated software via the Internet, or buying a single software program and then installing it on 100 of your company’s personal computers, you are committing copyright infringement. (Software Enforcement, n.d.) This holds you both liable under civil and criminal law. The actual copyright owner can pursue and choose between actual damages or statutory damages which can be as much as $150,000. In conjunction with the