It seems to me that the solution of this problem rests on the distinction between legal and moral rights. I think software piracy is theft and that's all there is to it in legal terms. Whenever somebody pirates a piece of software the software maker has a legal right to prosecute the pirate and as I will explain that is how it should be. However, there is a distinction between when it is legally feasible to prosecute somebody for theft and when it is right to do so.

Consider a person who sees a bunch of grapes in a supermarket and wants one of them. Now, she doesn't want to buy a whole bunch because she knows she won't eat most of them, so instead she takes a single grape without paying for it. Perhaps she does this once or twice a year. Now the supermarket manager might catch the whole thing on CCTV and decide not to prosecute. Why? Well, it would be a bit silly wouldn't it? And it would drive away customers. And it would be wrong to throw a person in jail for taking a single grape.

Nevertheless, I think that grape theft should be a prosecutable offence. Why? Well, imagine that somebody comes in every day for a year and steals two grapes. That starts to add up to the supermarket losing a significant amount of money. Likewise setting up a massive file sharing network with the sole purpose of systematically undermining a company's private property rights seems quite wrong to me.

I think there is a combination of factors at work which make software piracy a problem - some of this may be the fault of software companies, some of it is the fault of other people. Let's take the little girl alluded to in the article who downloads a copy of Brittany's Dance Studio. Well, the girl's parents have a computer, so the software can't really be out of their price range IMO. So if the little girl really wants it and the parents haven't bought it then it is very likely that the parents are dicks, which is very common. Even if it puts a bit of a strain on the budget they might say something like: "If you really want this we'll get it, but we won't be able to get that pink pair of jeans you want until next month." or whatever. The point is parent and child can come to a common preference. So a prosecution seems reasonable to me.

What about the students who can't afford the thousand dollar software package? Well, the software company could choose not to prosecute or to offer students a concession offer or the right to put their software on some number of computers specified in advance, with copies above that number being prosecutable. So for six students the number would be six computers or whatever. And if a student copies software from Uni perhaps the software company ought not to prosecute if he can't afford it.

Of course, all of the cases I've given above are a bit vague and could have holes poked in them but my point here was not to give a comprehensive list of when prosecutions should and should not be made. I just wanted to highlight the distinction. I think we should move past discussing the legality of this issue, on which the software companies are right. Rather we should start suggesting in which sorts of cases software companies should prosecute and discuss solutions to the problems raised by cases in which prosecution seems unjust.