Why do ordinary people break the law for little personal gain?
Dr Sigi Goode set out to crack the minds of software crackers.

A recent survey of software adoption and use indicated that software piracy accounts for 35 per cent of the worldwide market and costs the technology industry almost 40 billion dollars per year*. For those who know where to look, thousands of websites offer free downloads and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing for everything from Windows Vista to CD burning programs.
Copyright laws aside, duplicating and accessing pirated software is a simple task for an end user. But few people give thought to the difficult work of the software cracker that comes first. After hours of effort to remove the copy protection, crackers usually receive no tangible benefit, cannot reveal their identity and face a serious risk of prosecution. With so many negatives and no obvious benefits, what makes them break the law?

It was this question that Dr Sigi Goode from the ANU College of Business and Economics set out to answer in 2006. “I just found it so interesting that, despite the massive penalties attributable to these sorts of endeavours, it continues,” he says. “With something like the heroin trade that has massive penalties, you can make a lot of money. But when you crack a piece of software, you don’t make any money and it takes time and skill you could easily use somewhere else.”

Proving just as perplexing was the problem of how to approach and survey criminals who did not want to be found and could not be asked to admit to illegal activities. Previous research into software piracy had focused largely on end users and their motivations, using student sample groups. A unique approach was needed to find the original crackers and their motivations.

With former ANU Honours student Sam Cruise, Goode developed a questionnaire survey about crackers’ motivation and justification, with an option to provide demographic information (while remaining anonymous). “We went to newsgroups, we spoke with people we knew who had been in this sort of environment in the past and we posted some calls for participation in online discussion boards.”

A total of 28 people replied and 26 survey responses were received, of which 24 were deemed usable. “The participation wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t insignificant,” Goode says. “At least several respondents saw the very close relationship between what they were doing and what we do as researchers – exploring things, finding out how things work and then telling other people about it and making it easy to understand.”

The survey results overwhelmingly indicated that the challenge raised by the difficulty of removing copy protection is the principal motivating factor for software crackers, which Goode says is a tricky Catch-22 for software companies. “They’re trying to make it more and more difficult to break the copy protection but in the eyes of these people that just makes it more attractive.”

There was little suggestion from the cracker respondents that tangible benefits motivated their efforts and some quite vehemently rejected the idea of receiving money for their work. When asked for a view on those who seek payment for cracks, one respondent said, “Such people are lamers and parasites. Furthermore they should be jailed”.
The desire for social status and the personal need for free software also rated as factors, but much more difficult to determine were the crackers’ justifications for their illegal activities. “Some people develop very complex ways of neutralising moral barriers that ordinarily prevent this kind of behaviour,” says Goode. “The theory goes that, depending on circumstance, just about all of us do it at some time or another.”

In the 1950s the social scientists Sykes and Matza proposed a new perspective on deviant behaviour based on five techniques of neturalisation: the denial of responsibility, the denial of injury, the denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners and the appeal to higher loyalties. Goode and Cruise analysed respondents’ justifications within the bounds of these five techniques and found, in particular, that the denial of injury or victim was a strong factor.
“Some of them believed that there was no victim, or no significant victim, or no victim that didn’t already deserve to be harmed,” says Goode. “Some of the crackers even felt like they were doing something good by helping the software companies identify problems. In some situations they felt they were in fact helping the use as well by fixing or improving pieces of software to make them work better.”

Goode believes there is more to be done in this area of research, particularly in getting answers from those crackers who previously refused to take part in the initial study. “No matter what we said, there were some people who were convinced that we were law enforcement. There is an element of paranoia at play there and it’s possible that these people have different perspectives to bring.
“Because they’re massively paranoid, but still crack the software, maybe they’ve fashioned these techniques of neutralisation down to a real fine art. They understand there’s a big problem here, and they wrestle with it, but they still do it. I think they may have found a way of neutralising these ideas in their mind in a very advanced way.”

And beyond the software cracking, Goode believes the research framework can be applied to any number of types of deviant behaviour. “We’re interested in using the same method to explore other situations where other people may want to hide their identity. Few people will say they break the law except in situations without personal cost, which is what we can provide. For my money, right now, that’s the big thing to move forward.”

*Source: Business Software Alliance, Fourth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2008