Schools of Thought in Software Piracy Research

The unauthorized copying of computer programs, referred to as software piracy, continues to be a major threat to the security of the digital assets of software publishers. Software piracy has received much attention from researchers, often from different perspectives, or schools of thought. As a first step, we have reviewed the articles on software piracy in Information Systems journals, classified them into major schools of thought, and summarized the findings of each school. We briefly show that a comparison of findings from multiple schools of thought can facilitate triangulation of results. Our comparison also points to the need for further clarification of some issues. In future work, we will include articles published in journals of other disciplines, and develop an integrated view of the software piracy phenomenon to support our efforts to propose a holistic approach to reduce software piracy.