p2pnet - rss feed: IPRE squads to fight ‘piracy’
p2p news / p2pnet:- America’s Commerce Department has bowed to increasing pressure from the corporate entertainment and software monopolies.
With copyright infringement and CD counterfeiting elevated to the level of major crimes, IPRE squads are being formed for deployment in Brazil, China, India, Russia “and elsewhere,” says the Associated Press.
IPRE is short for Intellectual Property Rights Experts.
“They will follow up and monitor cases as well as have daily contact with officials in those countries,” Commerce Department boss Carlos Gutierrez is quoted as saying,
Warmly praising the ‘initiative,’ "When software thieves go unpunished, innovation suffers and the economy doesn’t grow as fast as it should," AP has the Business Software Alliance’s Robert Holleyman saying.
“A recent study by the BSA and the research firm IDC found that 90 percent of software used in China was pirated,” says the story. “The figure was 64 percent in Brazil, 74 percent in India, 87 percent in Russia, 70 percent in Thailand and 58 percent in the Middle East.
Britain’s prestigious The Economist recently seriously questioned the accuracy of the ‘report’ AP quotes.
In BSA or just BS it says, "The association’s figures rely on sample data that may not be representative, assumptions about the average amount of software on PCs and, for some countries, guesses rather than hard data," it said. "Moreover, the figures are presented in an exaggerated way by the BSA and International Data Corporation (IDC), a research firm that conducts the study. They dubiously presume that each piece of software pirated equals a direct loss of revenue to software firms.
“To derive its piracy rate, IDC estimates the average amount of software that is installed on a PC per country, using data from surveys, interviews and other studies. That figure is then reduced by the known quantity of software sold per country-a calculation in which IDC specialises. The result: a (supposed) amount of piracy per country. Multiplying that figure by the revenue from legitimate sales thus yields the retail value of the unpaid-for software. This, IDC and BSA claim, equals the amount of lost revenue.”
US president George W. Bush recently hired Commerce Department official Chris Israel to run his the administration’s anti-piracy efforts.
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See:-
Associated Press - U.S. to send teams to combat piracy abroad, September 21, 2005
seriously questioned - The Economist angers BSA, June 15, 2005
recently hired - Hollywood’s newest hero, July 23, 2005
September 22nd, 2005 at 2:44 pm
What are the cartels charging for the software in comparison to what they are paying people to create it? Do these software companies really expect that they can continue to charge outrageous prices for software when many pay only slave labor rates to the people who write it? How do we know that the lowest paid programmers are not supplementing their income by indroducing subtle bugs in some of the code in order to give others a way in to the system?
Does it take 3 months pay for someone in India to buy Windows XP? By hiring slave labour programmers to code software, companies can save a lot of money. Why then do they believe they should have the right to keep people from buying software from overseas sources rather than pay the outrageous price here in the P.S.A? If the big companies can do this and call it “Free Trade,” then we should also be able to do the same. If we are prevented from outsourcing our purchases to foreign countries, then we should outsource our puchases to the likes of BitTorrent and LimeWire.
By the way, I am not anti American. I am against the cartel-government alliances of ALL countries. I remember that a survey was recently done for people in many different countries. More than 2/3 of all the people believed that their governments did not represent the common peoples’ interests. I believe that government is one of the most dangerous invention of mankind. It is a necessary evil, a dangerous servant and a most fearsome master.
It is time for people to put away their differences and form alliances to protect themseves from the cartel-government alliances of today.
Peer to peer networking is just one of these alliances. Keep up the good work
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:36 am
These cartels are just economic terrorists dressed up as legitimate companies.
As far as im concerned, it’s about time we all stood up and say “We are not taking this shit anymore”.
If our governments don’t want to help the people, then we need to replace our governments with one that supports the rights of the individual, not the corporation. This is a time for revolution!