The Profiles of Software Pirates among Tertiary Institutions in Singapore

The study seeks to examine the perception of software piracy as well as to discover its underlying factors among Singapore’s three university communities. Some five hundred responses were gathered from students and staff. By means of cluster analysis and factor analysis, the results identify three clusters of pirate profiles as influenced by factors such as attitudes towards software publishers, general acceptance, convenience, and ethics. The decision tree method links each pirate profile to demographic and computer-related variables. It shows that while age is negatively related to software piracy, computer experience and computer usage demonstrates an ambiguous relationship to software piracy respectively. Further, the undergraduate students tend to be pirates more often than university employees, and the Malays tend to be less frequent pirates as compared to other races. It is hoped that the study will help the relevant policy makers to develop better strategies to protect and to enforce the intellectual property rights among the universities as well as in an increasingly knowledge-based economy such as Singapore.

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