Software piracy involves copyright infringement. There are many types of software piracy and here are a few of them.

• Shoplifting is sharing software with friends.
• Uploading and downloading is making copies of software and making it available to people using another computer.
• Software counterfeiting is duplicating software and selling it.
• OEM bundling is selling standalone software that was meant to be sold with something else.
• Hard disk loading is installing unauthorized software onto a computer.
• Renting is selling software for temporary use.

When you purchase software you do not own the program but instead you become a licensed user.

Software piracy causes businesses to lose a great deal of money:

According to the BSA (Business Software Alliance) and IDC 6th Annual Global Software Piracy Study, the retail value of unlicensed software — representing revenue “losses” to software companies — broke the $50 billion level for the first time in 2008.

Software piracy is when people illegally copy and distribute pieces of software.  The term is usually meant to refer to the illegal copying of computer programs.

The illegal copying of programs is a huge problem for the computer software industry.  Companies like Microsoft are very concerned about it.  For example, I have read that over 90% of computers in China that are running the Windows operating system have illegally pirated copies of that program.  This clearly is a huge loss of potential income for Microsoft.

You can also see how worried they are about it by looking at all the programs they try to get you to use that will tell them whether your Microsoft programs are legitimately yours or whether they are pirated.