Copyright act and determining relationship between software piracy related factors with ethical standards

Abstract

Software piracy becomes a gigantic concern due to the act of people who continuously use pirated software although they are aware that it is immoral and violated the copyright act. Although the Malaysian copyright act had gone through several amendments and updated from time to time to suit the encroachment of digital technology, people felt that software piracy gives no harm to others as it does not generate income for them. Nevertheless, researchers already revealed many factors that contribute to the use of pirated software such as the user’s behaviors, moral judgments, subject norms, perceive ease of use and other factors from several prominent theories. Here, we target to understand the factors contributing to software piracy on the piracy environment such as the pirating behavior, reciprocal fairness, procedural fairness, and hardcore of pirated software and its relationship with ethical standards. Ethical literature agreed with the stand that the act of software piracy is ethically wrong and immoral. Furthermore, results of the study demonstrated that three out of four chosen independent variable have positive weak relationship with ethical standard. Only an independent variable which is pirating behavior showed that there was no relationship with ethical standard. Thus, awareness on the negative impact of software piracy is important to educate Malaysians to become morally and ethically conscious citizens.