Come on, fess up. Is all of that software on your home computer legal (as in, you purchased it instead of copying the version your foolish friend just bought)? Apparently it’s not just you.
According to the 2007 State Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA), last year one in five pieces of software in use on American PCs was unlicensed and illegal. Not a big deal, you say? The BSA begs to differ. It estimates that the tech industry lost more than $15 billion in revenue from software piracy in eight states - enough to pay for the salaries of 54,000 high tech workers.
If that figure isn’t reason enough to forgo pirated software, Clint Korver over at ethics for the real world, offers another rationale. He says ethical habits start with small things - even such things as software:
Software piracy is to theft what white lies are to lies. In both cases it is all too easy for people to tell themselves a story about how it doesn’t fully count somehow. Everyone else is doing it. No one will know. Or a myriad of other rationalizations.
Sure, this is the kind of thinking that goes into small decisions, like telling your friend those pants don’t look so bad on her. But deciding to steal - even when it’s “just” bits and bytes like Microsoft Office - isn’t so small.
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