Software piracy is an urgent contemporary problem that manifests itself both locally in relation to an individual organization and globally when the digital community is forced to take measures to protect licensed products. IT heads have to resort to special software protection technologies and spend extra money. According to Rasch and Wenzel (2015), developers suffer losses, and their intellectual property is not valued, as a result of which investment costs increase. Regarding society as a whole, this issue addresses the topics of morality and justice. A deliberate violation of licensing standards for the use of digital products hinders the development of the IT sector and destabilizes the market.
As an example of an incident related to software piracy, which caused significant resonance, the case of the Kaspersky Security Network may be mentioned. Zetter (2017) describes this situation and gives the entire scenario in detail. According to the author, in 2015, an employee of the National Security Agency leaked secret data while trying to download unlicensed updates for Word and infected the computer with malware (Zetter, 2017). As a result, he was accused of spying and interacting with Russian hackers. Eugene Kaspersky, the CEO of Kaspersky Lab, was also brought to the case, and his reports were part of the proceedings. In the end, it was decided to delete all the randomly obtained secret data, which allowed the antivirus program managers to prove their innocence and willingness to correct the situation. In general, the consequences of this incident could have been extremely serious since important data could have become the property of hackers. Moreover, if an employee of the Security Agency had used official software, there would have been no infection and data leakage. This example proves the danger of using unlicensed programs and working with them.
References
Rasch, A., & Wenzel, T. (2015). The impact of piracy on prominent and non-prominent software developers. Telecommunications Policy, 39(8), 735-744. Web.
Zetter, K. (2017). NSA worker’s software piracy may have exposed him to Russian spies. The Intercept. Web.