p2pnet - rss feed: New BSA shlock horror stats
p2p news / p2pnet:- Along with the entertainment cartels, the software makers blatantly employ imaginative loss figures as an excuse to use international law enforcement agencies to act as industry cops, and to force through legislation which serves no one but them.
Back in May Britain’s The Economist, arguably one of the world’s most authoritative and influential economic publications, took the BSA (Business Software Alliance) to task over the numbers it was touting to ‘prove’ its owners, among them Microsoft, are being ravaged by counterfeiters, with file sharers in the background.
Now, “Overall intellectual property theft was up 370 per cent in August,” says Canada’s Gieschen Consultancy, quoted by silicon.com, which goes on:
“Microsoft continues to be the top software brand to pirate, followed in the first half of the year by Sony, Adobe, Autodesk and Macromedia, Gieschen said.”
The above companies are all part-owners of the BSA.
The figures are “echoed in a recent study by the Business Software Alliance and market researcher IDC, which showed 27 per cent of all software in use in the UK is pirated and estimated the cost of piracy to software makers worldwide to be in excess of £1bn,” says the story.
The BSA/IDC study claimed losses due to fakes had soared from $29 billion to $33 billion and, “The news comes as business executives from the world’s largest IP developers - including Microsoft, record labels EMI and Universal, and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline - met this week in London to back a collaborative initiative called Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy (Bascap),” adds silicon.com.
Following the meeting, expect floods of lamescream media reporting-by-press-release headlines about the agonies the poor but honest multi-billion-dollar entertainment and software companies are suffering.
For now, here’s what The Economist had to say about the BSA/IDC study quoted above:
“It sounds too bad to be true; but, then, it might not be true,” it said in an article entitled Dodgy software piracy data.
It continued, “Such jaw-dropping figures are regularly cited in government documents and used to justify new laws and tough penalties for pirates - this month in Britain, for example, two people convicted of piracy got lengthy prison sentences, even though they had not sought to earn money. The BSA provided its data. The judge chose to describe the effects of piracy as nothing less than catastrophic.
“But while the losses due to software copyright violations are large and serious, the crime is certainly not as costly as the BSA portrays.
“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. 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.”
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
See:-
silicon.com - Software piracy jumps to $185m as industry fights back, October 5, 2005
lengthy prison sentences - www.drinkordie.com, May 11, 2005
October 6th, 2005 at 2:01 am
Yeah, & 4 + 4 = 44!
October 6th, 2005 at 2:41 am
Thus the old saying “Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” Not that anyone who visits this site would be surprised to learn that the cartels are full of it. Only that they continue to get away with being full of it.