I need help creating a thesis and an outline on How Serious Is Software Piracy. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. According to Microsoft Company, software piracy has become a large-scale distribution of software online. Many piracy groups are linked to illegal activities such as money-laundering, gambling, prostitution, and organized crime. This software is mainly sold in retail stores and through online sites, their packaging normally looks genuine and the users will tend to buy not knowing that they are fake. Internet piracy is one way in which illegal software is sold. For example in Net jargon, they use the term wares to refer to the pirated product. Some of these products have even been modified to eliminate serial numbers, registration needs, date of expiry, and or any other kind of software protection.

Software piracy is a very serious issue because companies have continued to lose large sums of revenue. According to the Business software alliance (BSA), 130 billion dollars of software was legitimately sold while 50 billion dollars of software was sold in an illegitimate way. Organizations that produce and sell software have claimed that software piracy has a negative effect on the economy of many countries. The production of software is one of the main contributors to the economy, it employs over 300, 000 people and provides billions of dollars in terms of revenue to the federal government. It has fueled economic development in countries like China and India. The impact of piracy in terms of the economy according to the study carried out by BSA is that if global piracy is reduced by ten percent over a period of 4 years, it will create over 500, 000 new jobs and it will generate an extra of $140 billion globally.

A decrease in revenue for software companies will have a direct effect on consumers also. When the revenue goes down, the company will be forced to reduce consumer services and technical support. This will result in inefficiency and poor services from&nbsp.the companies, for example, when a customer call requiring services there will be few customer service representative and it might take long before a customer is attended to and customer representative who will be available might have moderate knowledge on what the customer requires.