• By: Admin
• March 25, 2023, 10:48 p.m.

2 min read

Pirating Software is equivalent to stealing

A colleague recently shared a thought from a Facebook group he is part of that seemed to condone the use of pirated software in churches.  It’s hard for me to believe that there are churches out there that would think this practice is ok and fine, but I would imagine most church leaders don’t even know it’s happening.

For the record, using pirated software is illegal, carries fairly hefty fines, and the likelihood of getting caught is going up quickly due to “rewards” being offered to those who come across software piracy.  I suppose I should also spell out what software piracy is for those who are unsure of what it looks like.

Let’s say the pastor purchases Microsoft Office Home for his personal laptop.  He then hands it off to the church secretary to install on her office computer.  She then hands it off to the worship pastor to install on his laptop, and so on.  The problem with this is there was only one purchase of the software but now it exists on several computers.  

People think this is a cheap way of getting software onto multiple machines and while the software developers are getting better at detecting and stopping multiple installations, they are not perfect.  These developers invest huge sums of money in developing their software and you are cheating them out of recouping their money by not purchasing a separate “license” for each computer.  This is called piracy and is illegal.  Even if a husband purchases Office for his computer, the wife must purchase her own copy in order to comply with the law.

Many developers offer “multi-user” licenses that allow you to install on a specified number of computers so it’s important to know how many people in your church will need the software and what options the developer gives its customers.  Is the software too expensive?  Save for it..it may sound silly, but if you need it badly enough, cast the vision for what it can do and what benefits it contains and put the need in front of the church.  You may be surprised how quickly it’s funded.

I want to stress again that at no time, whatsoever, is software piracy ok and legal.  As examples of Christ to our communities and the world, we should not even be entertaining thoughts of doing it.  I understand that giving is down, budgets are increasingly tight, and purse strings are even tighter.  However, that does not give us the right to resort to breaking the law.  Period.  How hypocritical is it for us to preach to the world about sin and everything they are doing wrong when our own churches are breaking the law?

Tags:

Church

software

Stealing

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