Explicating and Categorizing the Economic, Technologic and Cultural Effects of Copyright Law Violation on Iran Software Industry

This study has done to find the effects of copyright law violation on software industry of Iran. For this purpose, after investigating previous researches of the related fields inside the country, at very early step the authors held two sessions of group meeting with 11 members chosen among Iranian expertise of this industry. In first meeting the topic brought up and via brain storming method expertise declared their ideas without any limitation. After that in the second meeting controversial method exploited and two groups of expertise, one group stressed on pros and the other on cons, discussed the information acquired from brain storming session. Secondly final information was classified and through Delphi method and by means of a focus group results were reviewed .After all, following conclusions were obtained:Violation of copyright law can affect software industry from economy aspect; it means that can directly affect costs and incomes of both families and consumer or producer companies of software products .violation of copyright law can reduce the prime costs of companies' products and services and also family software requirements. Aside from that, because of its consequences for culture, technology and the way it affects approaches and attitudes of producers, can put limitations to export earnings of local markets. From technological aspect, violation of copyright can change people and organizations in to skillful users who are aware of latest changes in global market and can enjoy the benefits of free access to newest software products of the world. It can also help the local developers to produce strong high quality products without charging even one dollar. Although it can have some benefits the negative impacts are also undeniable, such as manipulated way of calculating the prime costs by producers and customers, promotion of consumerism in society and debilitating the motive for independent innovation. Talking about culture, violation of copyright law leads to ill consuming habits among customers and creates unusual expectations for costs and prices.

Keywords:

copyright law , software Industry , Infrastructure Software , Business Software , general software , Open source Software , Database