Sign in / up

back to article BSA: Software piracy's 'tragic' impact on US society

The Business Software Alliance claimed yesterday that software piracy in the US is costing the industry $11.4bn and local government $1.7bn in lost taxes. The software multinational lobbying group reckoned that although four out of five pieces of software is legally bought in the US the remaining counterfeit material results …

COMMENTS

House rules Send corrections
This topic is closed for new posts.

Page:

  1. Martin Usher
    Thumb Up

    Lousy Accounting

    All that lovely money disappearing that could be used for socially useful programs....what a great steaming pile of BS these guys come up with!

    There's probably nothing like that amount of piracy going on that these pressure groups think. They have no way of measuring it so they just do what are known in the trade as "wild-assed guesses".

    I recently came across yet another source of pirated software. Used computers. People buy these things from companies by the pound (OK, kilo) and resell them but before they're resold they are bulk formatted with a disk image. This image may not be the 'correct' one (its not as if the reselllers are going to individually reformat, enter license keys, upgrade and so on). So Microsoft's "Windows Genuine (dis)Advantage" logs it as "bootleg" -- another check mark in the column.

    Its a good thing that modern Linux software is as functional as Windows for most uses. The stuff's so easy....

    0 1
  2. Gary Smith

    All the money in the universe

    "The Business Software Alliance claimed yesterday that software piracy in the US is costing the industry $11.4bn and local government $1.7bn in lost taxes."

    Who is to say that people would buy the software if they had to get a legitimate copy ? Therefore no loss.

    I read somewhere before that someone took all the figures about supposed losses from all these "studies" that keep appearing, be it about software piracy or the amount of money lost to business due to traffic jams.

    The supposed sum of all these lost billions to the economy was impossible to achieve in reality.

    0 0
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    $11.4bn

    And I bet only 95% of them wouldn't use that software if they HAD to pay for it. (And/or would be looking for free alternatives).

    So thats just ~ $0.7bn lost.

    Just come on... how many people download, install and use Photoshop, a thousand dollar package, and use it just to put heads into naked bodies... You can do that in ms paint ffs.

    0 0
  4. A J Stiles

    Taxes?

    If it was not necessary -- by virtue of Microsoft's practice of withholding Source Code from users -- to send millions of pounds to Microsoft in the USA, firms would be at liberty to employ local programmers to work on improving their software. Local programmers eat in local restaurants, take their friends and families to visit local tourist attractions and pay local taxes. Thus, money stays in the local economy.

    Caged Software is doing us all a disservice. The first country to mandate that software be supplied with full annotated Source Code and users given the right to modify software that they have lawfully acquired, will see a huge upturn in their economy.

    0 0
  5. peter

    ...and all those bilions have nowhere else to go?

    Hmmmmmm.

    So all those 'billions' not spend on software would just......disappear?........get lost down the back of a sofa?......hidden under a mattress?

    Put another way, if we are all forced to spend billions on software, what won't we be spending it on instead? You can only spend (and be taxed) on the dollar in your pocket once.....unless you are an accountant working for BSA obviously.

    0 0
  6. A J Stiles
    Linux

    @ theotherone

    "in my country, buying a copy of windows costs a months wages. So if everyone in my country got rid of their pirated software and brought originals, would we all live in a better society? or would we all go broke and die of hunger?"

    Everyone in your country could get rid of their pirated software and install Free Software instead. Nobody would have to go broke and die of hunger. You'd actually get more jobs created supporting Free Software! For instance, instead of altering their workflow to match the software they use, businesses would have the freedom to alter the software they use to match their workflow -- or to pay someone to alter it for them. That's an immediate opportunity for someone to earn money, doing something that simply wouldn't be possible with Caged software. And that money would remain within the local economy, for reasons mentioned above.

    That certainly sounds like a small step on the way to a better society.

    0 0
  7. Aodhhan
    Thumb Down

    Nothing like a shunted one sided BIASED report

    Anyone who ever took a statistics course could see this is an over inflated, poorly planned, invalid study.

    First of all, the sample of locations is far too low, and there is no way they can account for the actual individuals sampled to get a clear figure at the micro level. They have also basically shunned the major business software market and target the normal home consumer; which leaves a huge share of the actual revenue generated by software companies.

    I could go on and on, but like I said, this is pretty easy to invalidate, and nobody is going to ruin their reputation by attempting to validate this report.

    I'm sure their main motivation is to get every legislature in the country to take another look at software piracy, but what they are actually doing is losing credibility with our lawmakers. When an average family has about 30 applications at home, you are saying each one has 5-6 applications which are pirated. Even a blind man can see your stretching the limit.

    I'm not saying it isn't a problem which shouldn't be looked at. However, when it comes to ripping off tax revenue, it is pretty far down the line. I'm shocked you didn't add a figure for stolen off the shelf software.

    Also failed to mention, that over 40% of software picked up from peer 2 peer sites has embedded malicious code, which should lower the figure even more, since more than likely this will obviously cause problems on the machine for a user who goes too crazy downloading pirated software.

    Don't forget those who you may have sampled who did actually download pirated software a few times, but failed to continue using it because the application is a bit too complicated to use without a set of manuals, or because they downloaded it to see what it is like, but then lost interest in it or it wasn't exactly what they wanted.... needless to say, they don't use it after one week.

    Also affecting numbers is the saturation point. Say someone downloads 30 pirated software applications a week. The person can't possibly use them all consistently enough to truly say you lost revenue. You also have to figure in someone may download 4 products which are virtually the same to see which one they like the best, and toss the others... again... no loss in revenue there.

    Basically, before you put out a crazy study in hopes of swaying elected officials, law enforcement and the public in general... please have someone validate it first. This one doesn't pass the "Giggle Test".

    0 0
  8. Daniel B.

    @A J Stiles, I agree!

    Living in a country very much like theotherone's description (average income for a family is around $500/mo) I agree that the best solution would be to swap out for free software. However, Mexico's culture on "pirate" stuff is so ingrained, people would still pirate software even the BSA had police powers. The "we can't fund the cops!" argument can't fight the "why pay for something I can get cheaper/free?" mindset, especially when your pricing schemes are way above compulsive buying prices.

    By the way, the BSA hasn't done any "piracy lawsuits" lately, as they recently LOST one of them against CCC (Mexican company) who they tried to manhandle into admitting they had pirated software. Guess what: they didn't.

    That said, I'd rather see the country switching to open sourced software. Some areas have already done so: Mexico City's government, some small&medium businesses, and at least one university ditched Office for OpenOffice.

    0 0
  9. Bob. Hitchen

    pirted software ?

    I had a pirated copy of photoshop CS3 once. I used it for a week an decided it was over complex for my needs even after watching all the tutorials. I also had a pirated copy of heroes of might and magic. After playing it for a while I went and bought it. I no longer have either pirated version. How would this equate to these imaginary losses?

    0 0

Page:

This topic is closed for new posts.