How A Company Should Handle IT-Related Ethical Issues

This is a situational case about how a small computer service company deals with software piracy.

Vandrel PC Tech is a small business that provides computer troubleshooting services to the residents of the town where it is situated. In their day-to-day dealings, they commission their technicians to fix the computer systems of their clients: desktops, laptops, notebooks, and netbooks. In addition to hardware troubleshooting, they also offer software-related fixes and services.

While most of the software tools and utilities that they choose to install in those client’s computers can be easily obtained online as freeware, some of their clients insist that they install the most popular software types which often belong to the licensed categories.

This is where the dilemma of Vandrel PC Tech stems from. They often find it hard to stick to the software copyright laws that they need to adhere to as a legitimate computer-servicing business.

The legal way of installing software on a computer.

The lawful way to deal with software installation would be that the owner of the computer must purchase a licensed operating system (OS). The best option to choose would be Microsoft Windows since it is undoubtedly the most popular of its kind.

But even the Home version of it costs $120, while the Pro version costs $200 – way too expensive from people’s perspectives considering that they can just download it for free from piracy sites that flock the internet. That is not supposed to be a problem for the technicians of Vandrel PC Tech.

But since they are the ones that are tasked to install the operating system to the computers of their clients, they will be sometimes forced to install counterfeit copies of Windows on those machines.

Why people are tempted to resort to software piracy.

Furthermore, the cost of the operating system is not the only problem. A computer system with no office productivity software installed on it would just be a seemingly useless machine. So to make it truly useful, a software package like Microsoft Office must also be installed along with the OS.

That would be an even bigger burden on the part of the clients since MS Office, as well as its sister product Office 365, costs around $150 for a one-time installation. Should the client choose a yearly subscription of those, it would cost between $70 to $100. Now the question again is, who would pay for such fees when there are freely accessible links that can provide downloadable versions of such software applications?

If the Vandrel technicians would choose to argue to the clients about piracy and legality issues, those customers would turn away and would find cheaper servicemen, typically those who have no qualms about what the law really says about software copyrights. To keep their business up and running, Vandrel technicians have no choice but to break the law from time to time.

Why people resort to piracy instead of purchasing licensed software is partly due to the unfair business practices that some manufacturers are doing. Sometimes, those companies would price their products unjustifiably. For instance, they would raise the subscription fee twice as much even though the newer version has only very minor upgrades.

Oftentimes, a new software version just appears to be entirely new due to its new visual interface. On its core though, it is still the same software that those people purchased years ago. While some companies do let their clients choose to upgrade or not, there are those who will forcibly enforce the users to subscribe to their newer versions, or else, they will see some disabled features in their application settings.

Why piracy continues to thrive in spite of the awareness campaigns done to combat it is because it is a relatively new kind of ethics – something that can be declared as gray areas which could evolve into a complete form of black when left unchecked and unregulated.

If we are going to take into account the motivation of hackers and cybercriminals, all of them have the notion that digital stealing or tampering is not a serious crime at all. They have the misguided idea that since it’s not a physical act in any sense, it should not be viewed as a very harmful habit. Sadly, most technologically uneducated people actually agree with that notion from cybercriminals.

How piracy is addressed by major corporations.

As the world’s largest software manufacturer, no other company is ever more affected by piracy than Microsoft. It is estimated that around 95% of desktops and laptops all over the world are running with Windows as an operating system. The remaining 5% are those that use Apple’s Mac OS, Linux, and other lesser-known OS platforms.

Although Microsoft is getting billions of revenues due to the widespread use of its products, it has without a doubt suffered the greatest too, when software piracy is being looked into. To address the issue, the software giant has established a global antipiracy group that monitors software pirates.

Working closely with law enforcement officers to support criminal prosecutions, such an endeavor is actually a network that spans 150 countries worldwide. Of course, Microsoft is not the only key player in the software development game. There are other major participants as well like Adobe, the leading software company in the manufacturing of graphics and photo-editing software. Apple Computers is also among them.

Although the company is more popular as a consumer electronic business, it has its share of revenues too in the field of application development. All of them along with the other minor key players in the industry are losing an estimated amount of $12 billion a year, which is obviously a very serious amount of money to contemplate

Open-source software could be the ultimate solution.

Some individuals, as well as some major business firms, resort to using open-source software to prevent themselves from being labeled as software pirates. It is a known fact that many companies use Linux, a powerful operating system that can be freely downloaded, used, and even modified by anyone with sufficient computer programming knowledge.

Within the Linux community, the source code of the OS that they are building can be freely scrutinized by anyone. With that kind of scheme, anyone can contribute to the development of all ongoing projects. Such an undertaking could be the very means of solving piracy.

But the problem with implementing Linux usage is that people are not familiar with it. Although there are lots of Linux versions that are very similar to Windows, people still highly prefer the latter. But even with the existence of freeware and open-source, the problem that software piracy is giving is still very widespread. It seems like there is no real solution for it, at least for now.

Since new technologies in software get conceived every now and then, people living in the digital age must acknowledge the reality that radical developments in technology must be handled properly, which could result in new patterns of behavior and lifestyles. Everyone, most especially the lawmakers must make compromises regarding this to accommodate such modern developments (Kuzu, 2009).

Most people don’t realize it, but Linux is actually more stable than Windows. It is more robust, and is more impervious to viruses and system crashes, mainly due to the fact that it has more programmers working on it compared to any other brand of OS in existence. In addition to its promise of greater power and convenience, Linux has also a greater number of versions and varieties to choose from.

Then, there is also OpenOffice and LibreOffice – two of the most popular office productivity suites within the open-source community. In case your company has a budget for buying a licensed copy of Windows but has no budget for buying MS Office, maybe you could settle in using OpenOffice or LibreOffice instead.

Like Linux itself, they are free and are believed by many experts to be even more powerful than others of their kind. Some companies do use Linux-based application software for their computers so they can be free from any legal obligations that copyrighting requires if they use Microsoft products.

But using open-source applications comes with a price, though not maybe that high as opting to use licensed software. Obliging your employees to use software that is a bit unfamiliar to them might require you to provide additional intensive training for them.

Of course, that requires a great amount of time and money to execute. But rest assured, such spending of resources will be surely worth it. Many companies are employing it as a solution, and it has been working out so well for them.