Before anyone worries too much for those poor BSA members, read Lies, Damned lies, and IIPA/BSA/etc statistics. In this article I offered some details on the flawed methodology used by the IDC to come up with these numbers. The reality is that they aren’t accurately accounting for people choosing alternatives to BSA member software, such as the growing usage of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).

They use these same bogus statistics in their promotion of Bill C-61 and other backward-facing legislative reforms.

Bill C-61 would disproportionately cause harm to competitors to the BSA, suggesting that their lobbying is more about ongoing anti-competitive practises and not about reducing software copyright infringement.

The press releases you see from the BSA are laughable, but not funny given there are bureaucrats and politicians that take their silliness seriously.

The claims in the recent press release included the following:

Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities.  The lost revenues to the wider group of software distributors and service providers ($11.4 billion) would have been enough to hire 54,000 high tech industry workers, while the lost state and local tax revenues ($1.7 billion) would have been enough to build 100 middle schools or 10,800 affordable housing units, or hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.

I guess any money not paid to BSA members just disappears and is not spent on other things in the economy that also involve jobs and taxes. In the real world we know that money not spent on software will more likely be spent on other things which are taxed the same — or even higher, given how BSA likes to also lobby to get software taxed at a lower rate than other products or services.

I know that people choosing legally lower cost software such as FLOSS are included as “piracy” in these studies. I guess my supporting FLOSS (both commercially and as an individual) could be blamed for their not being enough money to adequately equip the Canadian military in Afghanistan. I guess this makes me a terrorist sympathizer, by the BSA “logic”.

Yawn.

Russell McOrmond – p2pnet contributing editor
[McOrmond is an independent author (software and non-software) who uses modern business models and licensing (Free/Libre and Open Source Software, Creative Commons). He’s also the CLUE policy coordinator and p2pnet contributing editor.]

“He wasn’t our son anymore; he was somebody we didn’t even recognize,” she says in the Vancouver Sun.
“We were absolutely desperate. Our son was spiralling downhill.”

When he started at a new high school in Grade 10, “his grades started tanking, and he began having violent mood swings,” says the story.

But, it wasn’t until his parents installed spyware on their computer that they learned the extent of his drug involvement,” it states.
The 16-year-old’s mother took advantage of a new Alberta law and sent her drug-addicted child to a detoxification facility for five days, says the Vancouver Sun, adding:

“Since it came into effect on July 1, 2006, the Protection of Children Abusing Drugs Act has sent nearly 400 children between the ages of 12 and 17 – including about 60 from the Calgary region – into drug treatment.”

Slashdot it!

Also See:

Vancouver Sun – Law lets parents force kids into drug treatment, July 9, 2007

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