Posters to Combat Software Piracy in your Organization

The presence of Software Piracy is a major factor to consider when running an organization, and promotion of the fact can be done with these downloadable posters.

There is a considerable lack of resources out there when combating software piracy in organizations, especially when you consider all the noise that such organizations make when it comes to the issue.

The only major free resource I have found is at the SIIA store, which lets you download the PDF of two of its posters here.

A small, side project I did for a friend was to develop some sort of poster to discourage software piracy within their organization. The company itself was a software development firm, and the requirements was that it needed to engage the reader on an emotional level. Basically, they wanted to develop a sense of morality within the company as opposed to using scare and punishment tactics.

It was quite a challenge, and I came up with several concepts. The firm itself was very young with 190 employees, the majority of employees were male, and under the age of 26. It would thus have to be very targeted towards these people.

Another challenge was that Thailand has a very casual mindset when it comes to intellectual property rights, as the use of pirated software is so widespread it’s the norm rather than the exception. It also stems from the easy availability of pirated goods and the unaffordable nature of real software compared to real wages, among other things.

The First Poster: Guilt Trip

The two final posters produced thus targeted something very close to them. The first one (as seen above) appealed to their sense of being a programmer, a sort of “how would you like it if done to you” feeling, like a guilt trip. I have included a variation on the theme as well (pictured right).

The Second Poster: Wii Prices

The second one appealed to their pockets. The Wii is currently very popular in the firm, and many have complained about the marked up prices of the console in Thailand. It thus targets that sentiment to great effect.

Usage, Printing and Licensing

If you would like to use these posters to morally discourage use of fake software, you can download the original Adobe InDesign package or PDF files. The InDesign files are suited for up scaling to size A2 and larger for digital or offset printing, while the PDF files have been optimised for A3 printing.

Please note that these posters are both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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