Software Piracy in India and the Developed World :: Software Computers Technology Essays

Software Piracy in India and the Developed World Introduction: Software Piracy in India Software is one of the easiest and a very lucrative medium to steal. The copies made are as good as the original software and can be made quickly in large quantities. This makes it very difficult to effectively enforce anti-piracy laws, as the officials cannot raid each and every home in search of illegal copies of copyrighted software. In India, with a population of over 1 billion, effective enforcement of anti-piracy laws is a ponderous task. The government of India possesses neither the will nor the finances to dedicate a chunk of its budget to enforcing copyright infringement laws. Another problem is that to control expenditure of monitoring and convicting such a huge number of offenders is a complicated and time consuming process. Latest figures show that the Personal Computer market in India is rocketing skywards. In the quarter ending December 31st, 2003, 800,000 units were sold. Out of these 55 percent of the computer sales were of regional brands and unbranded systems. It should be noted that not all of these brands conform to software copyright laws as in the United States and Europe, or even in India. By the end of March 2004, an estimated 3 million personal computers are expected to sell. 2 The regional brands are the most responsible for propagating software piracy. In order to sell the computers cheap, pirated versions of software are installed on all machines sold. It can easily be deduced how much loss software piracy will cause the industry in the recent future. The use of illegal or copied versions of software costs the worldwide software industry more than 13 Billion Dollars a year in revenues, out of which 1.96 billion dollars are lost in the US alone, which has a software piracy rate of 23 percent. In some East-Asian, Latin American and European countries, 95 percent of the software used is pirated. So, India is better off but still has a long way to go in the fight against software piracy. India is unarguably one of the software hubs of the world, yet software piracy is rampant in this country. The software piracy rate in India is nearly 65 percent. No illegal activity of this scale can survive unless and until it has the support or involvement of a large number of users. The more concrete manner in which software piracy can be precluded is to pro-actively involve the public in the anti-piracy initiative.