On College Campuses, A Surprise: Software Piracy In Decline

February 28, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — In a lesson for the music and movie industries, software makers appear to be winning the war against software piracy – at least among chronically offending college students, says a University of Florida researcher.

Surveys of undergraduates at several public and private universities reveal the number of students who admit to using illegally copied “free” software remains high but dropped noticeably between 1996-97 and the 2000-01 school year.

The reason: Software makers are slowly figuring out how to make it more attractive for students to buy their products than to steal them, says Eric Chiang, a UF doctoral student in economics and the lead researcher on the project.

“It’s not like the mentality of the students has changed – their attitudes remain somewhat defiant,” Chiang said. “Rather, the software industry has found ways to get students to buy or use their product through legal channels.”

Chiang, who expects to earn his doctorate in May, and Djeto Assane, a professor of economics at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, first began gathering data on copyright infringement on college campuses in 1996.

They focused on college students because, as a group, they tend to be technologically savvy, have low disposable incomes and often need costly specialized software for technical education classes – all of which seem to add to the appeal of piracy. Chiang and Assane believed if they could get a handle on the scale of the problem among college students, it likely would represent the worst it gets among the general population.

In a 1996-97 survey of 148 undergraduates at three public universities and one private liberal arts college, the researchers found 53 percent of the students admitted to pirating software – meaning the true number likely was considerably higher, Chiang said. The material most likely to be pirated: games and technical software such as design programs for engineering majors.

Assane said it helped to have Chiang, then a master’s student at UNLV, involved in the survey because he was familiar with student lingo and culture.

“You have to have someone who can work with students, because they understand and can talk about the technical stuff, such as how to infringe, how to evade the protections, and how students share this information among themselves,” he said.

A paper detailing the first study appears in January’s edition of Applied Economics. But in two follow-up papers being prepared for publication, the researchers update the results to a more extensive survey in 2000-2001 at two large public universities.

In that survey, of about 700 students, Chiang and Assane found the number of students using pirated software dropped to about 40 percent, Chiang said, a 25 percent decline. The dip is all the more significant researchers, pointed out, because it occurred at a time when both the amount of software and students’ use of computers increased considerably.

Chiang said several anti-piracy strategies by software makers have panned out. For one thing, software makers now commonly make agreements with computer manufacturers to “bundle” software with new computers — in effect, selling it when the computer is sold.

Equally important, software vendors increasingly offer licenses to colleges and universities allowing students to use expensive software cheaply – but only while enrolled.

For example, business students at the University of Florida pay about $50 annually to use statistics software that would cost as much as $1,000 if purchased outright, Chiang said. An added benefit is that the software is updated for free, whereas updates would be impossible if it were stolen. If a student graduates or leaves, access to the software is cut off.

Still a third issue affecting the decline in piracy is price. Software is simply cheaper now than it was in 1996, reducing the incentive to steal, Chiang said.

In the last couple of years, the piracy problem on campuses has switched from software to music, Chiang said. As students get access to ever-increasing bandwidth, movie piracy also is likely to become common, he predicted. So far, record companies have taken a heavy-handed approach, seeking, for example, to shut down music-swapping sites such as Napster. Because savvy users on campuses always will remain a step ahead, the industries need to follow software makers in finding creative ways to encourage people to pay, he said.

These might include creating a market for “subscriptions” to libraries music and movies or a more efficient approach to the pay-per-download market, he said.