Greek Software Pirates: And You Thought Americans Had No Morals

Using Academic Search Complete from the TAMU website, I researched “software piracy”, the topic I am considering for my research paper. The article I chose for its scholarly attributes was called, “What do computer science students think about software piracy”, and was written by several Greek intellectuals. The first clue that it was a scholarly article was that the journal in which it was published, “Behaviour& Information Technology”, is intended for a narrow audience, and has the sound of being quite professional even though it does not come out and describe itself as peer reviewed.

This article contained an abstract and a long list of references at the end. The four authors were named, and the fact that there were four of them indicated that it was a group effort, which conveys that the information found must have been double checked in the writing process.

The content of the article concerned interviews in which the authors had asked Greek computer science students questions like, “How do you morally evaluate the use of pirated software?” and so forth. The results of this article seem a little worrisome, because although students generally admitted to knowing that pirating software was illegal, they did not seem concerned. The most common reason for using pirated software was the high expense of the “legal” software. 

This article was interesting to me because it took a very narrow subject (the way computer science students in Greece feel about software piracy) and did a very thorough investigation concerning it. The fact they interviewed 56 different students shows their dedication and their intent of presenting a fair representation of Greek computer science students.

Oh. And the article is ten pages long, which was another tip off used in ranking its scholarliness.

All jokes aside, though, I feel like this section of evaluating sources has been incredibly important. A lot of Americans have started to take information for granted, and will believe (mostly) whatever they read, both on the internet and in print. How do you feel about sources? Did you have a good feel for “credible” and “incredible” sources before we covered the section in class, or was this as big of a help for you as it was for me?