Software piracy is the illegal reproduction and distribution of software applications, whether for business or personal use. Most retail programs are licensed for use at just one computer site or for use by only one user at any time. The user is allowed to make copies of the program for backup purposes, but it is against the law to give copies to friends and collegues. This kind of piracy is impossible to stop even when more and more lawsuits have been filed by software companies.
Originally, the software companies by copy-protecting the software culminated a fair amount of privacy issues but at the cost of user inconveniency. Mst software now require some sort of registration, which may discourage would-be pirates but doesn't really stop software piracy.
An entirely different approach to software piracy is called shareware which acknowleges and promotes the copying of software and imposes a regular registration fee to the program's author directly. Instead of the futile effort to stop people from copying software, this relies on people's honesty.
The software copying is dubbed as "piracy" to imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on high seas, kidnapping and murdering people on them. Not only is copying and distributing the software is called piracy but also the possession of a illegally copied software is also piracy. Getting yourself to understand and identify the pirated copies may protect you beacause even if it is unintentional, this is intellectual property theft.
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