Preventing application software piracy: An empirical investigation of technical copy protections

To counteract application software piracy, software publishers have been implementing preventive technical copy protections into their software products. However, scientific research has not yet empirically investigated to what extent technical copy protections avoid illegal copying. Investigating this question, the paper studies the influence of technical copy protections on application software piracy. We apply descriptive statistics and a binary logistic regression to data collected from a survey of international software users. We show that technical protections fail in protecting application software from being illegally copied; none of the measures studied significantly avoids piracy. From this, we firstly derive implications for software publishers and researchers and secondly suggest directions for future research.