Trevor T. Moores

Ethical decision making in software piracy: initial development and test of a four-component model

Software piracy costs the software industry billions of dollars each year. To better understand piracy, we propose a model of ethical decision making that is an adaptation of the four-component model of morality. This model defines four internal processes that result in external moral behavior: recognition, judgment, intention, and behavior. We test our model with a sample of Information Systems students in Hong Kong who provided measures of self-reported behavior regarding levels of buying and using pirated software. Using partial least squares, we investigated the causal pathways of the model and the effects of age and gender. We find that use is determined by buying, buying is determined by intention, and intention is determined by judgment. Although respondents recognized software piracy as an infringement of intellectual property rights, this fact did not affect their judgment of the morality of the act. Significant differences are also found in the ethical decision-making process based on age but only limited differences based on gender. The implications of these results, including the development of a professional ethics program, are discussed.

Software piracy: a view from Hong Kong

Software piracy is defined as the unauthorized use, duplication, distribution or sale of commercially available software. Although it has been argued that the existence of pirated software stimulates an interest in legal copies [4], estimated losses for the software industry over the past five years (1994–1998) are approaching

Do consumers understand the role of privacy seals in e-commerce?

60 billion. Losses due to software piracy are estimated by assuming that for each new personal computer sold there will be a set of accompanying software sales. For instance, to make the PC work the user must buy an operating system, and to make the PC useful the user would have to buy a set of productivity software, such as a word processor, and so on. On this basis, the shortfall between expected and actual sales must be due to software piracy, and the cost of these missing sales represents the financial loss to the software industry. Using this method, the Software Publishers Association (SPA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) estimated that more than

Do privacy seals in e-commerce really work?

12.3 billion was lost in worldwide sales in 1994, and

A reversed context analysis of software piracy issues in Singapore

13.3 billion in 1995. Despite a drop to

Self-efficacy, overconfidence, and the negative effect on subsequent performance: A field study

11.2 billion in 1996—attributed by SPA/BSA to cheaper software prices rather than a decline in piracy rates—the figures for 1997 showed a rise to

The effect of national culture and economic wealth on global software piracy rates

11.4 billion. In January 1999, the SPA merged with the Information Industry Association to form the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA; www.siia.net). The latest SIIA report on software piracy, released in June 1999 [10], showed a continued decline in software piracy rates from its peak in 1995, but lost sales still amounted to

Internet Privacy: Interpreting Key Issues

11 billion. Similar to the decline in 1996, however, the SIIA attributes this to the economic downturn in many of Software Piracy: AView from Hong Kong

Key issues in the management of information systems: a Hong Kong perspective

E-Commerce sales in the U.S. totaled

Cultural problems in applying SSM for IS development

56.0 billion in 2003, an increase of 26.4% over the 2002 total of