Piracy Is A Bad Idea: Why You Should Stop Pirating Software
Are you tired of paying for software? It is hard for many people to pay for pricey software.
That does not mean that you should pirate software. India is quite notorious for piracy. In fact, India is #41 in piracy rate list. Almost 69% of software in India is pirated.
In this post, I will discuss why you should not pirate software.
And before you say, “This does not happen in India”, let me tell you it does happen in India.
Take a look at this and this news article.
Indian copyright act has provision for up to 3 years of jail time for using pirated software. The choice is yours, no piracy or 3 years in jail.
With the rise of Free and Open Source software, the quality of free software has increased dramatically.
These days, free software is just as good as paid one and in some cases, can be even better.
I have reviewed a lot of free apps here on Technoleash like Pulse, Skitch, Readability etc. which are completely free and beat lots of paid applications. Going for these examples only, Pulse is by far the best app to read news from multiple sources. Skitch rocks for screenshots and Readability is one of the best way to read articles and having a reading list for later.
And when it comes to desktop apps, free software can be even better. You can take Adobe Reader which asks for upgrades every now and then. It is a PDF reader that takes 70 MB on hard disk. I use Sumatra PDF which takes less than 5 MB and is much faster.
Many good software and apps are going freemium these days. They offer basic/home or even complete version for free and charge for multiple licenses or commercial use.
This is good for you as you can use most of these at home for free. Good examples are MailChimp, Dropbox, Cubby. Many software like CCleaner and Avast Antivirus are free for personal use.
You can use the freemium software instead of pirating paid apps.
If you are a student, you can get discounts on many products easily.
Many companies provide a percentage based discount. Some like Prezi even provide the paid plan for free.
As a student, there is very less need to pirate anything. You can get most of the software out there for less price.
Developers who make software do not get paid out of thin air. Every copy that you pirate and use means one less sale for a developer.
By paying for software, you are supporting developers in creating better software in future.
I once used a lot of pirated software. However, I have reduced it to 0 now. I paid for Windows 7 and 8, am using free software where ever possible and supporting software developers(45 games in my Steam library and all apps on my iPhone stand witness for that).
When are you going to stop using pirated software if you do ? Let me know your thoughts in comments.
Well said Ishan..In our country we still pirate the OS itself then how we can expect them to turn down.
While I agree with your views Ishan, I believe that we still have a long way to go. Can you imagine not using the Microsoft Office suite of business apps? We are still long ways of getting rid of Word and Excel, and those apps are often not included in PCs around the world. For example, I lived in Mexico for 3 years and I was lucky enough to be working for one of the largest universities in the country, so I got all software for free through the university system. However, when I tried to get the licenses for private use, they were ridiculously expensive. I really hope that things are changing. On the Mac, I am huge fan of Skitch but I haven’t been able to find a good equivalent on Windows. Do you know of one?
Hi Ishan,
You raise some really good points in the fight against software piracy. Now, I just wanted to add one that you left out; pirated software is not eligible to receive support in the event of a malfunction. At the same time, updating to a more advanced version becomes a problem with time if you don’t have the correct license.
Alana