Illegal Software In Vietnam

There's a statement that the 21st century is the century of Information Technology. It's right. Taking a look at the last fifteen years, we can see that the boom of IT has brought our life a great change. The distances become meaningless, the complicated problems become easier.

With the development and competition between companies, the PC is more popular in some universities today; you can see almost all students having a computer. However, registered software seems not to be at the same stage. With the crack, patch or cheat tools from China or made in Vietnam, a big percentage of computers in Vietnam are using illegal software.

As we know, software is a program run on the PC written by software engineer and is only a kind of data stored in the hard disk. When a software is published, it can be written onto a CD-ROM and sold for PC users. It also can be stored on the Internet so that users can download it after paying through credit card.

The price of software is not too expensive if we make a comparison with what it can do for us. For example, in February 2009, a setup disc of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate was sold with the price of $224; an installation pack of Microsoft Office Pro costs $326. With only those two programs, you can do most of your office work at a much faster speed than manual. Another example, with only $18, you can own a copy of Norton Antivirus 2009 and not worry about viruses, adware, spam mail, and any risks to your data.

However, paying those amounts of money for some software seems to be very uncommon in Vietnam, where the illegal CDs are sold largely in the CD shops. With only VND 7,000 equivalent to $0.5 you can buy everything unless it is bigger than 700MB. An Australian teacher had to shout Oh My God! Unbelievable! when taking a look at a shop in Hanoi, where Windows XP, Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, Corel Draw, Photoshop, and everything else were being sold with the same price of VND 7,000.

Illegal software is not only sold in the CD shop but also broadcasted on the Internet. Many websites and forums in Vietnam allow people to download anything they have, certainly including illegal software without paying anything.

Using the illegal software, users can sometimes meet uncomfortable problems such as being unable to download update packages from the Internet or losing data suddenly. With some students, re-installing Windows Operating System is a weekly task, because they always meet unsolvable problems. Despite these hardships, people still ignore the registered software because of its price.

This attitude of users brings software producers in Vietnam in a very hard situation. To deal with those things, they have tried to use some protecion method, such as product key, soft-locker, etc. However, technically, software is still data and it means that in some way people still can use software even without a key.

A lot of crack and patch programs, written by Chinese or Vietnamese hackers are now being spread on the Internet, and it takes only a few minutes to google to find those tools. It is said that the tries of software producers in Vietnam trading are still unaffected.

Even a child knows that using illegal programs is not right. Nevertheless, the amount of registered software used in Vietnam is still tiny in comparison to the number of PCs in use. It's certainly unfair with the producers, and it's necessary for the government to give a strict law in this field.

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