Why do you think in developing countries like India, it is difficult to stop software piracy?
Question : Why do you think in developing countries like India, it is difficult to stop software piracy?
Software piracy is hard to stop for several reasons:
- It’s not a violent crime, so eliminating the criminals by killing them is not really an option. As such, the only remaining option is a legal approach - charging them with a crime and threatening them with prison if they don’t quickly agree to a guilty plea.
- Software piracy is very easy. If you want your software to work without internet connection, then you need to put the entire code and all the data into the hands of a users; consequently, any anti-piracy measures have to be in their hands as well, making it possible for smart coders to reverse-engineer your code, find the part which performs verification of “license to use”, and remove or twist that part so that the software works without a license.
- Sharing cracked software is ludicrously easy and hard to detect.
- There are millions of people involved in this. Quite literally, not only your prisons, but your court-rooms as well are not big enough to realistically charge everyone. So you have to prioritize who you will go after.
- Experts still can’t agree to what extent is piracy harmful. There were numerous cases where a pirated version of something was instrumental in making it popular, which not only later led people to buy a legal copy, but generated interest in a sequel, which then became massive hit.
- People who can afford buying movies and games generally do so; people who cannot afford it will either pirate them, or not get them at all.
- The price tag associated with a legal software is generally high.