Software Piracy among IT students of J&K: Ethical or Unethical

Software piracy committed by university students in the metro states of India has been published widely in various computer literatures. However very little has been reported about why and what proportion of students, particularly IT students, in a Northern State like J&K, uses pirated software. In this paper a survey was conducted among the computer science students of different educational institutions of J&K. In this paper the use of pirated software with fourteen issues related to demographics, computer exposure etc. has been analyzed. This survey was tested using 340 responses received from the survey. Several interesting findings emerged. First, the study reveals that 87.50% male students are involved in software piracy of either type where as 75% female students are involved in piracy in one or other way. Secondly, the percentage of students involved in piracy falling under the age group 17-21 is 78.26% where as students above of 22 years involved in piracy are 90.91%. Thirdly, the