Executive Summary

Nowadays, piracy is a growing concern throughout the software industry,

and many people dont know when they are violating the software license
agreement or that they have installed pirated versions of software. According to
SIIA Anti-Piracy, software piracy exists in many forms such as softlifting,
unrestricted client access, hard-disk loading, OEM piracy, commercial use of non-
commercial software, counterfeiting and Internet piracy.

This study aims at combating the vice of software and hardware piracy in
the computing scene that has currently been on the upward trend. The
objectives of this proposal are to help university students acquire free access to
the software they needed by developing a system that developers can use to
verify a students qualifications, which we are trying to convince the developers
to give students who study courses that required them to use such software free
access. For example, Maya already give 3 years of free access and epic games
provide free access to Unreal Engine for everyone and only need to pay them 5%
royalty of their profit "when" they published their game. So they are completely
free for educational purposes. The strength of the study is on the diversity of the
new methods herein advanced. Therefore, questionnaires have been conducted
from 100 university respondents as our method of analysis. The question from
the questionnaire that is anonymous was able to obtain the different ranges of
piracy and hence discussed the relevant approaches usable in curbing the vice.
The expected outcomes show that the mostly the students were knowledgeable
about software piracy but nevertheless used the pirated software. On the bright
side, it can be considered as an investment to the software developers as these
student might be their potential buyers of such software.