A REVIEW ON SOFTWARE PIRACY IN NIGERIA
BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY: In Nigeria, the prevalence of online fraud and software piracy has risen over time. The federal government of Nigeria has committed significant efforts and funding to combating the spread of piracy in Nigeria (Asongu 2017). It is now commonly understood that a competitive environment for twenty-first-century growth is based on the knowledge economy (KE), which is essentially dependent on intellectual capital and intellectual property rights (IPRs) (Yang and Maskus 2008). In summary, IPR protection procedures are critical to the advancement of KE components like as innovation, information and communication technologies (ICTs), education, economic incentives, and institutional regimes (Asongu 2017).
Significantly, Christensen and Eining (2021) opined that while advances in KE and related technologies have resulted in a greater availability of ICT-related commodities in the development process, there is some agreement in scholarly and policy circles that reverse engineering is appropriate to enhance development catch-up because existing technologies in some less developed countries are more imitative and adaptive in nature than in developed countries. The technologies used to replicate or pirate KE goods have proliferated.
According to our review of the current literature, even if there are serious concerns about software piracy, the issue over the need of IPR protection in the software piracy business remains open (Mansfield 2002). The mainstream discussion on IPR protection has been dominated by two schools of thinking. The first group comprises of academics who believe that stronger intellectual property protection promotes economic progress (Kai Yan & Tam 2021). The positive nexus, according to this school, is fostered by the attractive impact of greater IPRs on factor production. Another school of thought holds that rigorous IPR protection and ratification of international IPR treaties are detrimental to developing nations' economic success (Kai Yan & Tam 2021).
According to this school, less restrictive intellectual property regimes are required in the near run (at least) for less developed nations to benefit from technological spillovers necessary for economic development. This viewpoint is consistent with research that show that software piracy improves profits for copyright holders, scholarly publications (Asongu 2017), and pro-poor development (Asongu 2014). (Asongu 2017). The study's goal is to look at software piracy in Nigeria.