July 8, 2004

Software Piracy?

Posted by tomo at 01:23 AM in computers . | 2 Comments

I just had to comment on this Reuter's news report with the headline "World software piracy losses climb to $29 billion". I guess it's normal practice to use controversial or unsubstantiated headlines and then clarify them later in the article, but since this article acknowledges that the BSA has a history of inflating numbers to suit their purposes shouldn't this article also take their new numbers at more/less than face value?

Gripe #2: ...such as open source software commonly called "shareware." Reuter's needs to learn what these things are so they don't sound so damn retarded. Fucking google it.

Gripe #3: The article mentions Vietnam as a piracy capital. According to the BSA, well over 90% of software there is pirated. Of course, since the price of Microsoft Windows is several times the average monthly wage of these people most of the software pirated in these piracy capitals could never have been paid for and can't realistically be included in any dollar amount lost. Those dollars never existed to begin with.

So was this article just someone being lazy and regurgitating a BSA press release or is Reuter's just that clueless?

 

Comments

To play the devil's advocate here:

If you are going to pirate the most current versions of Microsoft's or Adobe's software then you need a fairly modern machine to run this software on. For the argument that people are too poor to buy the software, how come they are not too poor to buy the hardware?

I think this is less of an issue of piracy for personal use as it is corporate piracy. Large companies and governments running pirate versions of Windows Server 2003, etc. This is who the BSA is after.

Posted by: ryan at July 8, 2004 3:21 PM

Good point, but not necessarily the case that they would have the latest hardware or be running the latest software. They are probably not running the latest hardware, because older hardware can be got for much cheaper. But the software they would run, even old software, would still be just as expensive -- old software doesn't really get discounted. (Side note: hardware seems to be getting cheaper while software seems to be getting costlier... )

I just bought a brand new Dell computer for $400. But most in these "piracy capitals" certainly are too poor to be able to afford any new hardware. But if they were able to at, say, half the price I paid, they would then still have to pay just as much for a copy of Windows XP Home, more for XP Pro, and several times as much if they wanted Windows 2003. And that's just the operating system.

I bet many people get their computer access at an office or at an internet cafe. I bet the internet cafes have a shitton of software installed on their computers -- anything anyone might ever want to try -- all pirated. To purchase that software would cost several orders of magnitude more than the price of the hardware, and there'd be no way almost any of that software would be purchased if it couldn't be pirated -- it just wouldn't be available. Point being that these aren't necessarily lost sales.

I do believe that, also here in the States, they should be going after the corporations with money rather than the individual home users. But is the BSA constraining their statistics to only those corporate users? I doubt it. But I'd like to see some numbers.

Posted by: agent1073 at July 8, 2004 5:39 PM