Ethical Reflections on Internet Piracy

Piracy, unauthorized copying, is today a highly widespread phenomenon, which causes a lot of worries and disputes in the media industry. Many of us download software programs from the Internet without fee and without considering the consequences. We could end up with less well produced products and the overall economic of the society could be negatively affected. Is there any situation or reason when it is ethically acceptable to download and use other people’s work without permission and without paying for it? Are excuses like to high prices on the products, downloading just to test a program before buying it, social interaction through sharing software etc. liable excuses to make piracy ethically acceptable? In this paper we try to explore the reasons and integrate them in a case study. The cases are analyzed by using different ethical theories, through which the conclusion was reached that there are some exceptions where piracy could be considered not unethical.