High development cost and software piracy: a study of motives

Every year, software piracy costs billions of dollars to organisations using software as well as those producing software. This has been intensified with the ever-increasing ease, speed, and ubiquity with which information – and software – in our hyper-connected world can be shared. This study investigates how computing students, as the future technologists and professionals, approach the piracy issue. We introduce a conceptual model for software piracy motives, derive a number of relevant hypotheses about these motives, and apply statistical tests to evaluate their validity. Among other findings, results from this study indicate that the high cost of software is a major motive for software piracy, but it cannot be directly addressed, as today’s software engineering methods, in spite of all the advances made in the discipline over the past few decades, are still not efficient enough to produce software at a substantially lower cost. This suggest a need for, and we hope opens us a discussion on, new models...