Software Piracy in Nigeria

Abstract

The enormity of software piracy varies in different countries and Nigeria is not an exception. Software piracy occurs in diverse forms such as soft lifting, hard disk loading, counterfeiting and unauthorized renting. Many reasons are behind software piracy. Software piracy has many negative economic consequences: Competition distorted by pirated software at the expense of local industries, loss of tax revenue and jobs because of the lack of a legitimate market, increase in cost recovery which, overall, affects social well-being of the citizenry. Findings have revealed that Nigeria has the highest case of software piracy, intellectual property theft and other sharp practices in the IT industry in Africa. Hence, this work investigates software piracy in Nigeria; revealing the concepts, causes, effects; and proffered solutions. We adopted the descriptive survey design. The research instrument used was online questionnaire with a sample size of 3270 people drawn from a population of respondents from the six (6) Geopolitical Zones of Nigeria. The results show that software piracy has statistically significant effect on the economy of Nigeria and that high standard of living is the biggest cause of software piracy in Nigeria.