College students are more frequently downloading commercial software from the Internet and peer-to-peer file sharing programs without paying for the software, according to survey results released last month.
The survey, done by industry group Business Software Alliance, found that 23 percent of students had downloaded commercial software. About 42 percent of those students had not paid for it, while 26 percent rarely paid.
Also, about 30 percent of professors and administrators had downloaded commercial software and 16 percent of them had not obtained it legally.
Compared to music downloads, software piracy is not a huge problem. However, according to Alliance spokeswoman Laurie Head, "We found that music piracy is a gateway to software piracy."
The survey found that 69 percent of students used peer-to-peer programs or the Internet to get music and 75 percent of those students did not pay for it.
Head said more students participate in music piracy than in software piracy because music files are smaller and easier to download than software files. But, she said, "as compression technologies improve, it gets easier to download bigger files."
Campus networks are fast and there is widespread use of peer-to-peer technologies, which adds to the increasing number of people illegally obtaining software, Head said.
"At least for students I know, I don't think [software piracy is] so big of a problem compared to music and I don't think it will become a big problem," sophomore Steve Morris said.
The findings also suggest that colleges are not discouraging students from getting involved in software piracy, Head said. Results indicate that no more than a third of the students said professors actively discourage them from swapping software.
"Educators have not made an effort to inform students," Head said. She said the alliance "would like colleges to develop programs" that would make students aware of the illegal behavior in software piracy.
Eric Weakland, director of Network Security at AU, said the administration makes sure students who use the AU computers and networks have read the "Acceptable Use Policy," which includes a policy on copyrighted works. The policy prohibits students from downloading copyrighted materials and is available at www.american.edu/aup.
The University does not monitor student's activities online, Weakland said, and they only make sure the network is running properly.
"We don't make it a habit of monitoring what people are doing, but if we see that a student or user is downloading big files, we investigate and we issue a warning," Weakland said. "All we can do is inform students so that they know that there are consequences to their actions. They can get into trouble."
Many AU students believe software piracy is wrong, but the high cost of software is a huge reason why many choose to obtain software from their friends, the Internet or peer-to-peer programs such as Kazaa.
"I think its illegal. It's copyright infringement," Morris said. "I think that the high price of software would really affect the level of piracy."
Professor William Delone, chair of the Information Technology department, said, "AU has policies and expectations" and AU favors "the intellectual property issues."
Professors in his department also make sure students learn that software piracy is wrong and unethical, Delone said.
"Here in the business school, when we teach, we bring guest speakers from software companies to talk about the copyright and how piracy hurts the industry," Delone said. "The real issue is the ethics. We need to remind students of the ethics involved."
"While students are saying it's OK to share and swap software they almost overwhelmingly say that people who develop software should be rewarded," Head said. "We hope that the study will help us better address the problem," she said. "Education is the first step-making students know it's illegal."
The survey included interviews with 1,000 college students and 300 college educators from across the United States. The margin of error is plus or minus 3 percent for students and plus or minus 6 percent for educators.
