New BSA shlock-horror study
p2p news / p2pnet: The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has again teamed up with the International Data Corp (IDC) to provide the world’s gullible media with a new “study” on software piracy.
You may remember these two organizations from when Britain’s prestigious The Economist savaged them over dubious research methods used to conduct a similar ’study’ last year.
Undeterred, the BSA released another report today claiming 35% of all PC software is pirated.
This has apparently caused a loss of $34 billion for the BSA’s member companies, who include the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Dell and Adobe.
“With more than one out of every three copies of PC software obtained illegally, piracy continues to threaten the future of software innovation, resulting in lost jobs and tax revenues,” declares BSA president and ceo Robert Holleyman.
Holleyman must be forgetting about FLOSS software which consistently leads the field over sluggish corporate machines in terms of innovation.
Other claims in the report include:
- The four countries with the largest percentage point drop in their piracy rate during the past year were China (4 points), Russia (4 points), Ukraine (6 points) and Morocco (4 points).
- The countries with the highest piracy rates were Vietnam (90 percent), Zimbabwe (90 percent), Indonesia (87 percent), China (86 percent) and Pakistan (86 percent).
- The countries with the lowest piracy rates were the United States (21 percent), New Zealand (23 percent), Austria (26 percent) and Finland (26 percent).
Australia is a bit of a worry though, with 31% of Australian business software being pirated.
The Sydney Morning Herald has Business Software Alliance of Australia chairman Jim Macnamara saying, “Our concern is that Australia seems to have a consistent one-third piracy rate. That’s well behind other developed countries.”
Meanwhile the BSA notes, “The BSA-IDC Global Software Piracy Study covers all packaged software that runs on PCs. The study does not include other types of software such as that which runs on mainframes or servers or software sold as a service. IDC used proprietary statistics for software and hardware shipments, conducted 5,600 surveys and enlisted IDC analysts in 38 countries to confirm software piracy trends.”
We eagerly await another rebuttal by The Economist
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See:
savaged them – BSA Shock Horror loss report, May 26, 2005
BSA – Piracy Rate Unchanged at 35%; Global Losses Increased by $1.6 Billion, May 23, 2006
Sydney Morning Herald – No movement on piracy, May 23, 2006
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May 24th, 2006 at 4:55 am
These guys claim to get some or most of their figures by comparing pc’s sold to software being sold. Considering that xp has been out for over 5 years now i’m positive that much of this “piracy” is people who’ve bought new pc’s, tossed out the old ones and felt no need to pay for another copy of the same OS. Same would go for office 2000, i’m sure a lot of people have bought new pc’s and simply copied office 2k onto it after tossing the old pc.
As always the BSA is full of BS.
May 24th, 2006 at 7:42 am
The logic is just nuts, have they heared of Linux? Also will they be counting those Intel Mac’s as a computer which h—————————–41184676334
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May 24th, 2006 at 7:43 am
The logic is just nuts, have they heared of Linux? Also will they be counting those Intel Mac’s as a computer which hasn’t payed it WinTax?
I am now going to some research in same way BSA has done it. Microsoft is making X Billions a year as such that proves they are over charging for there product, as such there product price must be reduceded by 200% in effect paying the customer to have legal copy. lol
PS Jon sorry about that problems with proxys.