Software piracy is theft. There is no way to sugar coat it; there is no way to make it anything else. When someone pirates software, he is taking a product that doesn't belong to him. Yet, if software piracy is theft, and American morality tells us theft is wrong, why do so many Americans participate in this form of theft? Perhaps, it's because down insides of them, in some part they're not quite able to grasp, they believe that not all theft is immoral.
What makes theft immoral? What is the root cause of the taboo we place against the theft of an item. It all revolves around the fact that a thief is depriving someone else the rightful use of an items. When an item is stolen from a person, there is a monetary loss associated with it. You've hurt that person.
Yet software piracy is a different form of theft. There is no physical product that is taken from another individual. The thief has deprived the other person of nothing. In fact, in most cases the individual where the original copy has come from is willing giving it to the other person.
Of course, there's more to theft than simply depriving of it from the individual being stolen from. The producer of the product is also hurt since the thief will not proceed to buy the product on their own. This, more than anything, is the hard caused by the piracy of computer software. The theft that occurs is really the theft of products from the software provider.
When a thief takes a physical product from a store, they are depriving the store of the profits that item would bring. There is no way for the store to sell the product anymore and it must waste resources and lose money producing a new copy of this product. This is not the case in the world of software piracy. When an individual acquires a copied version of a piece of software, the software maker has lost no piece of physical property. The only loss that has occurred is the potential sale to the individual.
Here is where the final distinction between moral and immoral software piracy occurs. Many people who pirate a piece of software are acquiring something they would never buy on their own. The pirater is acquiring a piece of software that they do not need and is merely a luxury. If he were unable to find that piece of software illegally, then he would not buy it.
That means that there has been no loss caused to the software company. The pirater has stolen no physical item from person who is now deprived of it. the software maker has lost no sale on the person who would never pay for the product anyway. In fact, the software maker has a gain from this. The person is now going to tell others they use the product, and perhaps even recommend it to someone who will purchase it. When the next revision of the software comes out, the person may have grown so accustom to it, they will be willing to pay for it. When asked by their company what products they want, they may recommend it there as well, causing an entire company to purchase it.
Too often people accept the ethics dictated to them without contemplating the reasons behind them. It's certainly easier to accept all actions that fall into the circle of theft as unethical without questioning why. Yet it is that questioning that make us human. Every rule has an exception, except this one. Theft is immoral because it causes of a loss of property or profits to another individual. Software piracy, while theft, in some instances can be performed without causing any loss of property or profits. In fewer instances it can even cause a increase in profits to a company. Software piracy can be moral in limited cases; perhaps sometime it will be legal in limited cases.