Software piracy prevention: Punish buyer or seller?

Abstract

Software piracy is illegal and the government should adopt effective measures against it. After many years of fighting against it, software piracy does not die out, but rather becomes more serious. In this paper, the phenomenon of software piracy is investigated from the perspective of game theory. An evolution model is proposed and several simulations of the software market trend are followed this model. They simulated the market without punishment, with punishment on buyers, on sellers and on both of them. Through these analyses, a conclusion can be drawn that punishing the buyers is a necessary measure against software piracy. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.