Law Commons^™

A Network Effects Perspective On Software Piracy, Ariel Katz

Ariel Katz

The software industry frequently maintains that software piracy is no more than theft and a cause of huge losses. Courts and other policy makers easily adopt that straightforward argument. Surprisingly, however, many software publishers do not employ any technological measures to protect their software from piracy and many popular software products are distributed without any means of protection and are easily pirated. This lack of protection is puzzling; a solution for that puzzle is the focus of the article. The first part of the article challenges the conventional explanations that are usually given for the failure to protect software and …