As technology betters itself with seemingly less help from human beings, there is a need to keep our own systems upgraded and up to date with the current technological situation. This process is one that comes easier to some than it does to others. Software, particularly business software is and software piracy is a big issue in the technological world of today. There are many reasons why software piracy is illegal and it should not be allowed.
Software is the life blood of many companies that produce it. Software piracy from large scale to small scale hurts these companies everyday. Software piracy is anything that includes illegally sharing a copy of software. This could be done by exchanging a disk with a friend, or by mass distributing illegal copies all over the world. The solution to software piracy is not going to be easy. Although it is impossible to prevent every method of software piracy, software publishers can at least discourage it and make it more difficult. Some of the more traditional anti-piracy schemes have involved the following: intentional physical defects at certain locations on an installation disk (with floppy disk software, but not with compact discs), registration codes that can only be obtained with a telephone call to the software publisher, and a tedious ritual of looking up a randomly selected word from a certain page of the software documentation. Another more successful but usually annoying method is the use of a dongle, which is an extra piece of proprietary hardware that must be installed on a computer in order for a given software package to work.
Some new and much less tedious copyright protection methods have been developed more recently for use with optical discs. For the most part, optical discs include the widely known CD-ROM and the newer Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD. The DVD similar to a CD-ROM, only it is capable of storing more data than the combined capacity of twenty-five CD-ROMs.