I was reading around the Internet for interesting news and tidbits, when I stumbled upon this page http://news.com.com/Software+piracy+losses+double/2100-1014_3-5259395.html which was proclaiming the following as the main topic of this article:
Software manufacturers lost $29 billion to piracy in 2003, more than double the previous year's losses, according to an industry survey released Wednesday.
After reading through the article, it states that the BSA, Business Software Alliance, which is an organization that defends the right of software organizations against piracy and other illegal operations, claims that $29 billion was lost to piracy and to the large P2P networks.
When reading through that, I just couldn't help but laugh at the outlandish claims. Here are my rebuttal. First of all, I believe most computer literate citizens know the danger of downloading software from P2P is very high. Considering the chance that people can easily post software with trojans in the P2P network that are hard to trace, the P2P network has been a breeding ground for viruses if software has been traded. To be exact, alot of virus writers, like to create new viruses and use the P2P network to spread them. Due to that reason I don't think the P2P network can be accused of the biggest factor in software piracy. P2P networks can be accused of piracy in items that are relatively safe such as music which their files are relatively safe when compared with executables.
I just think this outlandish figure has been raised because it could be used as a leverage against countries that have done little to curb piracy in software, though this is only my hunch. I won't say much more on this issue, but I do want to state that alot of software piracy happen on the university circles and home users. My observation is that license software sold in 3rd world countries are simply too expensive, and a normal household would find owning the license copy of the software to be very dear - which in turn drives alot of people to buy more pirated copies. I do want to point that in the gaming industry, they have cut prices of license games to the point that they are very competitive with pirated versions. Due to this fact, more license games are bought of the late. If coupled with some public awareness campaign, I'm sure the figures of piracy would dramatically drop.
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2 comments:
i did a study on the RIAA claimed losses when napster was new and controversial.
the formula used to determine the 'losses' is you estimate the amount of product (say, music) that has been traded and you multiply by the retail price of the product had it been bought.
of course the figures are vastly over-inflated, assuming everyone would have bought the products they had download were napster (or other p2p services) not available.
and this is in america- in developing countries most people simply cannot afford to buy all of the software they use, especially for small businesses. here in thailand to buy microsoft office one must spend the equivalent of 5 months wage of a factory worker.
i wonder how many copies of microsoft office would sell in america if it were priced at $7500 a copy.
There is one controversy about marketing software by the income of the host country. As in the example of the games, by lowering the market price down, there was a huge increase in the number of people buying license games.
However one bane that happened was that these games were also exported to countries that have higher income. License games in Thailand cost about $10, and when its exported by some channel to USA where the average game is about $50, there is a huge issue that was stirred up.
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