Aurora velasco

Summary: Software Piracy among Ed. Tech Students        
Title: ”Software Piracy among Technology Education Students: Investigating Property Rights in a Culture of Innovation”
Name: Aurora Velasco
Date: May 7, 2009

Reference: Teston, G. (2008). Software Piracy among Technology Education Students: Investigating Property Rights in a Culture of Innovation. Journal of Technology Education [online serial], 20, 1. Retrieved May 5, 2009, from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/v20n1/index.html

Problem: It is estimated that billions of dollars are being lost each year due to software piracy. According to the article, one out of three commercial software installations circumvents purchase. In congruence with the financial loss, according to the author, is that piracy also results in the loss of property rights to the people who make the software, including graphic artists and instructional technologists, and reduces future jobs for educational technology students of today. Without that money coming in from software sales, the companies cannot pay the salaries for those jobs and therefore tech students coming into the workforce must compete for fewer jobs.

Context: The subjects of this research study were 640 seventh grade students from three middle school technology education programs. The idea behind this study was to compare the attitudes and behavior in 2 groups: middle school tech students who see software piracy as ethical, and those who see it as unethical. Results from this study were also compared with those of a study done years earlier in 2002 to see what changes there were in piracy attitudes. The author mentions that the subjects of the earlier study were non-technology middle school students.

For the current study, the students were asked to go through a survey that contained some dilemmas, such as “a girl considers whether to steal a drug for her sick mother”. Each of these dilemmas is followed by a multiple choice question asking how the person in the dilemma should act. They are then given 16 statements justifying actions related to the dilemma, and then the students rate the statements where 4 points indicates great importance, and 0 points indicate no importance.

Findings: At the start of the study, the author reports that overall most of the students surveyed were more comfortable with software piracy, than other modes of piracy such as the drug-stealing example. For that particular scenario, 32% of the subjects supported stealing it. On the contrary, a whopping 63.4% of the subjects supported stealing software from the Internet. When comparing these numbers to the earlier study done in 2002, the author notes similar findings.

After this initial survey was complete, the students were then divided into the anti-piracy and pro-piracy groups for further analysis of the data. Even still, it was found that a general trend towards being against theft of most kinds yet more lenient towards software piracy was evident with the students. 54% of the pro-piracy students felt that software was public property, and 53.9% of the anti-piracy students felt the same. The numbers are almost identical! Again the authors makes note of how most students were pretty comfortable with stealing of software, but had more moral qualms when talking about the stealing of physical property such as drugs or bicycles. As a conclusion the author offers several ideas that could be implemented to instill in young students more positive attitudes towards software property rights. Some of these suggestions include: Pedagogy – incorporating property rights issues into design and instruction; Curriculum – Use more textbooks that go into greater detail about property rights in technology; Research – Continue to perform studies about people’s attitudes and behaviors with property rights.

Recommendations: I do agree with the author that the subjects for this study are age appropriate. Youngsters are now a leading group that is known to download software and data illegally. However, I would recommend that other age ranges be looked at to perform similar studies. In particular teenagers and college-age students, as because of the type of work they need to do for more complex school projects, they are also very known to obtain software by illegal means. The author doesn’t spend to much time considering other age groups which I think is a problem because we could learn more about attitudes and behaviors in regards to digital property rights if we expand our focus to these other age groups.

He also offers up some excellent ideas to better expose students to property rights issues, however more must be done. It’s not enough to just tell someone “this is what you should do.” They need to know why, and what punishment would they suffer through if they don’t do as they are told. If in addition to addressing property rights issues the author would have suggested discussing retributions, I think his solution system would have more success.