, or that a disclaimer of acceptable usage will shift liability to someone else. The fact of the matter is you could be liable for anything that you do that contributes to the infringement of copyrighted works Perhaps the reason that money lost due to piracy has increased finds its roots in the actual heart of why software is pirated. Computer software has grown increasingly expensive in the past few years; many people seek to find their software free or at a reduced price, and in this folly, another myth is brought out: Software is expensive and it is okay to download programs as long as you delete them after 24 hours. Unfortunately, with this loop, more people pirate the software due to its expensive nature, and the software industry keeps increasing their price to cope with the economic loss due to the pirates actions. There is a certain irony to warez sites in that, though they spread free software, they generally have pornographic banners advertising a commercial pornography site, and are compensated for these advertisements. Many of these sites are also difficult to navigate as most of their links send you to a porn site. There are software companies and authors that distribute their software free, or for a test drive of sorts. Shareware is a term used for software that encourages you to buy the software after a certain period. This software usually has all the features enabled, but, unfortunately, there is no way to stop people from just using full-version shareware outright even if certain features are disabled after a period. The reason behind this is that many hackers and pirates have the knowledge to reverse engineer a program and modify it to have the features enabled forever, or to get rid of nag screens. The official U.S. law for copyrighted software penalizes violators with either or both civil and criminal punishment. Damages sought by the software company can reach to $140,000 for each illegally copied program or work...
