Software piracy is the unauthorized copying or distribution of copyrighted software. This can be done by copying, downloading, sharing, selling, or installing multiple copies onto personal or work computers.

What a lot of people don’t realize or don’t think about is that when you purchase software, you are actually purchasing a license to use it, not the actual software.

That license is what tells you how many times you can install the software, so it’s important to read it. If you make more copies of the software than the license permits, you are pirating.

Simply put, making or downloading unauthorized copies of software is breaking the law, no matter how many copies or people are involved.

Whether you are casually making a few copies for friends, loaning disks, distributing or downloading pirated software from the Internet, or buying a single software program and then installing it on multiple computers (including personal), you are committing copyright infringement—also known as software piracy.

It doesn’t matter if you are doing it to make money or not — if you or your company is caught copying software, you may be held liable under both civil and criminal law. Civil penalties can be as high as $150,000 per software program infringed. In addition, introducing pirated software into your computing environment can open you up to the risk of damage to your network through defective software or malicious code.

Source:bsa.org