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Development Of A Mobile Agent For Preventing Software Piracy On A Network
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1.3 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The problems of software piracy are its negative effects on the following areas:
• Funding of continuing research and development efforts
through sales of software
Software
developers and vendors have envisioned a future with so many
possibilities through creation of various software products. Mathworks
(2013) stated their goal to accelerate the pace of discovery,
innovation, development, and learning in engineering and science through
the software they create. To this end, making substantial and
continuing research and development efforts, which are ‘funded’ through
the sales of their software products.
• Loss of jobs
Unfortunately
today, throughout the world, we do not only have a problem of software
piracy reducing this funding of ongoing development efforts, but also a
problem that software vendors have not really achieved the desired much
in their quest to prevent this dangerous menace which affects their
profitability and which also is a threat to jobs of so many software
developers.
• Financial losses to software firms and the government
The
BSA study concluded that software piracy cost the U.S economy $1.9
billion and resulted in more than 105,000 lost jobs (Jack, 2004). At
global level, the global piracy rate hovered at 42% in 2011 while a
steady expanding marketplace in the developing world drove the
commercial value of software theft to $63.4 billion (BSA, 2011). Apple
(2013) also stated that more than $11 billion is lost to piracy every
year. Software piracy has also been a discouragement to so many who
wishes to invest in the software industry thus affecting the expected
alternative software solutions to solve people’s needs in the future. If
enough strict software piracy–prevention measures are not put in place,
it could lead to a very high increase in software prices in the future
because of the need for business sustainability on the side of software
vendors.
1.4 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
This study is aimed towards achieving the following results:
•
Using the migration behaviour of mobile agent codes for software-user
identity collection and for software usage count. And also to implement a
scenario illustrating such mobile agent code activities.
•
Combining an online activation code system with the mobile agent system
in a way as to make them a single unit aimed at preventing software
piracy through technical means.
• Building a web interface which will act as the data processing element for the combined system.
•
Ensuring that an unforeseen circumstance that may arise after the
users’ first time installation of software is put into consideration.
•
In addition, using data collection procedures to ensure that the study
has an outstanding contribution to make towards the fight against
software piracy, but first ensuring that data analysed is from a
population ‘really informed’ about software piracy.
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