BSA Says 41% of Software On Personal Computers Is Pirated 569
An anonymous reader writes "Individuals are turning to P2P networks and auction sites in staggering numbers to acquire or transfer illegal software and in doing so are harming the economy whilst exposing themselves to malware, identity theft and criminal prosecution, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance. Beyond P2P and auction site piracy, the report also draws correlations between Internet piracy and the spread of malware such as viruses, trojans and spyware, which often exploit vulnerabilities in illegal software that does not benefit from security updates provided by manufacturers. Although the correlation is not universal, geographies with high instances of software piracy suffer from high instances of malware."
41? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because malware never comes with legal software... (Score:3, Insightful)
Freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:41? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well I'm actually surprised it's only 41% pirated software on personal computers, considering it's not often that people buy software applications for non-work purposes and most are free or have alternatives.
But it's true that piracy is hurting the industry (be that software, games, music or movies). Yeah it would be nice if all of that would be free, but it's not a good model to sustain the development and producment. You can always argue that those who like doing it "just for the fun of it" will keep doing so, but it's not going work. The quality suffers and there wont be as many different options or products. There's a reason why everything isn't free already (because it could be - there's nothing to limit it). Market and income is how world works and is needed to produce products, in a way or other. Either by user directly paying for it, or from ad revenue ala google (and losing some of your privacy in the trade) or by other means like open source with support and sponsoring from other companies.
And it's not really a surprise that you might get infected with malware when downloading from warez sites.
Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
What a lousy article - all puff and no content:
- The FA discusses online auction sites as a "hotbed" of trading illegal software. But it doesn't say whether the BSA distinguish between online auctions offering cracked copies for download, pirated installation media or perfectly legitimate resale of software which the seller has no further use for.
- There's no real explanation of how they reached this figure - do they assume a single person using a torrent installs the software once? Twice? Never? Once then decides they don't really need it so uninstalls it?
- Even if the BSA did explain how they reached this figure, how do we know that their methodology is sound and gives reasonably accurate answers? AFAIK there is no methodology that is generally known to give accurate answers to the question of "how many PCs have application X installed, where X may or may not phone home and there may or may not be cracked versions of X in the wild which modify any existing phone-home functionality?"
Thing is, the BSA must know that these numbers are not reliable and that they can't get reliable numbers. I think the reason this article exists is the BSA are seeding the news wires. Who wants to bet that the next thing they'll do is lobby representatives in governments around the world using these bullshit figures and that's the only reason the figures exist?
Re:Freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
They aren't, and so they won't.
What they are concerned about is losing market share to open source, so they'd rather pretend it doesn't exist and try to eradicate the philosophy of free software in the public mind.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
They simply live in a world where all second hand software sales are piracy. Its the only possible way this figure could even be remotely correct.
Maybe software prices are too high? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Piracy on home computers (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wave the bullshit flag on this one. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why doesn't the BSA promote Linux instead? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oooooo pretty graph! (Score:3, Insightful)
Start with c:\windows. As 95% of all malware hides in there. Bonus it ismost likely pirated anyways.
Depends.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've mentioned it before. I have a friend that almost refuses to buy music when they can use whatever the current flavor of P2P is to get it. I had a different friend that gladly would download the newest games from torrents and play them. Not to mention the various other indiscretions I or other friends have done. Several people still will email me with a 'hey, do you happen to have a serial number for...' These aren't college students or poor workers from some low-end job. They are often well paid professionals (often in IT). They just don't want to spend the money. It's not some sense of 'information should be free!' or 'software shouldn't be patented!'. They just don't want to spend the money, so while these reports may not have numbers that everyone believes, I certainly have seen it day to day. Just without a metric that I can quote.
It needs to be said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Because malware never comes with legal software (Score:5, Insightful)
Well:
1. Is simply not true. Adware and spyware are common in commercial software.
2. Also not true - the first thing a pirate does is strip out the crap.
3. If you *have* paid for it, it could be infected. That's why you scan everything.
Re:Not to be confused with that other BSA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Because malware never comes with legal software (Score:5, Insightful)
- If you've paid for the software, it's highly unlikely that it will contain malware or adware.
Unless it comes from Sony or Microsoft...
Statistically worthless (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Can't measure it - you can't measure how many people downloaded your software through illicit channels because, by definition, those channels are usually unmonitored, don't keep logs, and aren't subject to easy investigation. You might be able to measure a particular computer at a particular point in time but any measurement being done on "behalf of" the BSA is going to be worthless. You'd have to randomly monitor thousands of PC's in dozens of categories (home, business, mobile, poweruser, etc.) and get permission to report on any "unlicensed" software there, and then chase it up with the company concerned to see if it was actually unlicensed (rather than just using the wrong VLK or similar for convenience).
2) Can't compare it - the chances of those metrics being stable across such countries as Turkey and the US are unlikely.
3) Can't correlate it - Just because malware goes up with pirated installations doesn't mean anything - it just means that the pirates prefer to download porn which may or may not introduce malware... it doesn't mean the malware is in the pirate software.
Statistics are worthless quoted out of context. We have no idea what was measured, how, why, what bias was introduced by the measures, or anything else.
To be honest, I imagine the percentage to be *higher*... I've seen dozens of people with Winzip on their computers who haven't actually bought it but they heard they needed it to open ZIP files. I've seen dozens of work laptops come back with full installations of football games, office, etc.... technically that's copyright infringement ("software piracy") because it's a breach of the license. I expect the true figure to be nearer 80 or 90%.
But then you have the reasoning that it's somehow linked to malware in any way other than "people get malware too"... almost 100% of the home PC's I see have items of malware on them (again, depending on your definition).
If you want to say "copyright infringement is bad and puts £5 on the cost of every game you buy, or £50 on the price of Office", people would listen. Making up bollocks statistics about nonsense correlations just makes me switch off and let's me know that, actually, you're just trying to scare me into buying things because you can't think any other way would work (and thus don't understand software "piracy" at all). I don't pirate, either at work or at home. I just move things to open-source if I can't afford the real package, and I never buy anything without a demo. No demo, no trial version, no purchase. I also don't buy anything with DRM that interferes with my usage of the product. I'm not alone.
Stop spending your time analysing vague correlations and look at those statistics about why people pirate in the first place. Almost always it's cost, convenience and because a certain percentage of those "pirate" downloads are actually your own customers just trying to get the bloody thing working (I've had to break DRM schemes in work in order to be able to install compliant to our licensing - it was tons easier than our negotiating with the company in question to do the same thing). Be open with those stats and then things get interesting: How many pirates, on average, end up revealing upon further investigation that they *already* own the software in question, but the DRM got in the way? Or that they lost the install disk? Or that they needed original media to recover their PC's and it wasn't supplied by the manufacturer? I've seen all three of those and even done the second myself - I needed a particular install disk and it was an emergency and the person I was working for didn't have the original disk to hand. After I ensured that they were entitled to the licences, I just downloaded one and used that instead (after checksum verification). Does that contribute as being "another" PC with pirate software?
Re:41? (Score:1, Insightful)
Both studies were done by college universities with no bias, unlike the studies coming from RIAA and BSA. (Use google to find them if you're curious, same way I found them.)
If it's on the internets it must be true!
And anyhow, you say in your own post that it is hurting the industry, even if its on smaller scale. The funny thing is that it's also hurting open source.
I've seen many of your pro-piracy comments in countless number of threads already, but you also cant just count solely on lost sales. Pirating MP3's also hurts streaming services like Pandora and Spotify too (but interestingly, spotify is so good that I havent needed to try to find mp3's since i started using it). Also it's obvious that if people couldn't pirate, they would buy more. *Not the same amount they pirate, but still more*. It's just because people can do it, they do. If I could pirate furniture, food and beer, why wouldn't I? (and no need to carry those beers from store either!).
Getting everything for free sounds nice in paper, but it comes with tons of problems which has been discussed to death already.
And the fact is that noone is making any artist/developer/movie maker to ask for that price. They can already publish it for free and upload to torrent sites. But they've decided to ask a price for it, and if you want to use it, you need to pay for the asked price. If it's too much, just be without it.
Re:I don't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)
harming the economy
Right, like they would have bought it if they couldn't pirate it.
I love this bullshit. As you say, there's no way of telling how many percent of those who pirated would actually buy the software at hand. In my experience often people pirate because they're lazy, meaning they know some program from a while back and instead of looking for a free alternative they just pirate it because they're used to it. But also sometimes they actually need that program, however more often they don't.
Also it's very easy to throw expressions such as "harming the economy" around. But let's think about what this means. If, and we have to remember the big if here, there would be a significant increase in such sales -- instead of people looking for free and/or open source alternatives (which by the way is already happening, anyway let's continue with the hypothesis) -- then in an international aspect this would harm the economy as the national currency would be weakened due to less trade. HOWEVER (one of those important caps moments) -- don't forget that piracy is also an international phenomenon, meaning if all countries have 10% piracy it would be -- in terms of economic balance, exactly the same as if we had 0% -- or 80%.
What about national level? Well at national level the currency would merely shift towards those selling the software, as they collect the fees.
What about the personal economy? Well you would have a slightly stronger currency (given that other countries ignore piracy) yet you would still, at a personal level, make a loss.
Now let's ignore the moral aspects here, you can yell theft all you want but that's another discussion. This discussion was about the economy and how someone tries to bullshit you from this angle to change your mind. Change your mind for the right reasons, if you consider it theft then fine, but don't eat whatever crap that's thrown at you. By using the expressions such as "economy", a very big machine which can be difficult to understand, you can persuade somebody into a lot of things, since ultimately they will tend to feel stupid because they cannot break down the concept and understand how this hurts the economy -- you see no explanation is given, and that's the point of the argument. So if you feel stupid, that's even more of a reason to ask the question: why?
Re:It needs to be said that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:41? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah just like getting bit by an ant "hurts" me, but not really. It's just an ant. Nothing to have a hissy-fit over like IRAA and the BSA seem to be having.
BSA: "Oh noes! We've been bit an ant. The end is nigh"
US: "Stop being a wuss."
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, except you're about 8 years too late. I'm pretty sure you'd get a lot more than a "seriously nasty letter" now.
Re:41? (Score:2, Insightful)
"But they've decided to ask a price for it, and if you want to use it, you need to pay for the asked price. If it's too much, just be without it."
Listening for free or not listening at all gives the exact same amount to the maker: 0. So why wouldn't I listen? I pay what I can, but I'm not going to deprive myself just "because", I act based on reason, not on some orthodox morality.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>>> Both studies were done by college universities with no bias, unlike the studies coming from RIAA and BSA.
>>
>>If it's on the internets it must be true!
No it's in two university studies - published in peer-reviewed journals. Can you not read? Besides if you really thought the 2 studies I cited were wrong, then you'd go off and find some other university studies to prove that copyprivilege infringement is horribly high.
And pros can write those same tools for GIMP (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, they can write BETTER tools for GIMP because GIMP was created specifically from the ground up to be tooled up like that.
PS "It doesn't do CMYK" is bollocks. Photoshop didn't do it once. Was it unsuitable then? Well people fucking bought it, didn't they?
Re:Because malware never comes with legal software (Score:3, Insightful)
Or Electronic Arts.
Re:41? (Score:2, Insightful)
The difference here, you are comparing a roughly flat rate music industry to the software industry.
Autodesk Maya 3D software is $1300.00 just to name 1. It is well worth the money but some kid trying to learn it might be tempted to pirate it because there is no way he can afford it. Thankfully they offer a free version for learning but you get the idea. A $16 music CD does not compare to a $1300 software package as it relates to lost sales.
Re:41? (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's true that piracy is hurting the industry (be that software, games, music or movies).
[citation needed]
I'm sure it was the pirates. The global recession had nothing to do with it.
Re:BSA invents statistics - higher ethics? (Score:3, Insightful)
I do, but they are not copyright infringement sources. If I already own a license, they are simply enhanced methods of distribution or a convinient malware-cleansing caching proxy.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's true that piracy is hurting the industry
Piracy may be specifically hurting IP industries, but it's a net win for the economy. The dead weight loss [wikipedia.org] caused by monopoly rights damages the economy as a whole, probably by amounts that dwarf the whole revenue of those industries, and only piracy mitigates that damage.
but it's not a good model to sustain the development and producment.
At the efficiency levels seen in the monopoly industries it's obvious that neither is monopoly a good model to sustain development and production. At about 5% efficiency, as in the music industry, it's even worse than the worst of government run programs. Others, like productivity software, have a level of fungibility which has at least had some competitive effect. None, however, demonstrate anything remotely like what an acceptable overhead should look like in a competitive industry and together the IP industries are an albatross around the neck of todays western economy.
Re:41? (Score:2, Insightful)
One could go on about how many people are running around with Photoshop installed but I'll save that for another day
Re:41? (Score:3, Insightful)
The BSA is every bit as corrupt, ignorant and greedy as the RIAA and MPAA, the difference is that they've got a pretend right to demand access to business networks to look for "pirated" software.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
And where are they claiming that its lost sales? They've just saying that 41% of software on personal computers is pirated. There's no talk about lost sales.
Stop making stuff up.
Re:41? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have no automatic right to software. The fact there's no net cost to them does not make it right.
I'm not going to 'deprive myself' of a place to sleep so I'll pick the lock (in a non-damaging way) of your front door and sleep in a spare room in your house. No cost to you so any complaints about my squatting are just based on stupid orthodox morality.
Inane example yes but this sense of entitlement that some people have is sickening. By all means pirate but don't pretend you're not doing anything wrong by doing so.
WOW, just wow. (Score:2, Insightful)
So you justify your piracy and that makes it OK?
got to love people like you.
I suppose I can come up with a reason for anything, like how smokers justify their health care costs because smokes cost so much?
So you pirate music because of an arbitrary value limit you assign and that makes it alright?
Re:WOW, just wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA doesn't deserve protection under the law anymore. And as much as I'll get flamed for that statement, we're all thinking it, and we're all acting on it.
But if you want a non-inflammatory morally relevant statement - I've been paying taxes on blank media for years, paid directly to the RIAA, and THAT has bought me any free copies I want, of whatever I want. Because I've already paid for it. And so have you.
Re:41? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sixth Annual BSA-IDC Global Software Piracy Study (2008), Page 17, when describing how they calculate piracy:
1. Determine how much PC packaged software was deployed in 2008;
2. Determine how much PC packaged software was paid for/legally acquired in 2008; and
3. Subtract one from the other to get the amount of pirated software.
To calculate "deployment" they asked 6,200 people (p.17 of above report) how much software they install in a given year. Take into account that these 6,000 people are spread across 24 countries - that's an average of just 258 people per country for their survey! (For those that are interested they estimate the rest of the world based on these 24 countries)
Software paid for/legally acquired comes from IDC estimates.
They then get their magic 41% figure... Is it just me or does this seem as flimsy as a polystyrene tow-bar?
Re:41? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't miss the fact that their biggest out and out, completely undeniable, absolute lie, was that piracy was hurting the economy. The truth is, when the money is not spend on licensed content it still ends up getting spent on others things in the economy, like food, clothing, accommodation etc. often things in the economy that are locally produced, have a much greater impact on employment within the local community and are often of far greater 'real' value.
Technically speaking of course piracy is often far better for the economy as it keeps money in the local community and it even has environmental benefits as it cuts down on media manufacture and transport costs. Whilst it is true that piracy does interfere with the accumulation of huge profits for handful of individuals, in truth for the majority it provides economic relief and a bit of mindless escape in a difficult economic situation.
To be fair, to crack down on piracy we would also have to crack down on the other side of software licensing, false advertising, non-warranties and cost recovery for damages caused by faulty software. So I have to think making the software companies pay the full costs for their deceits and misbehaviours would likely far out way realistic losses caused by piracy. It is also hardly surprising that an association that supports for profit publishing that adds no value to anything apart from a lot of false advertising is also opposed to P2P the free to publish network, where content creators can use the greater community to publish their works directly to other users.
Re:41? (Score:3, Insightful)
The BSA operates like a SWAT team on small businesses and are very disruptive. Trust me, if you a small shop relying on a consultant for your support, you don't want them showing up.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your spare room is not "abundant." You only have one of them, and it can only hold a finite number of people.
MP3 files are abundant. Once they exist, there can be an infinite number of them at zero additional cost.
You are kidding yourself if you insist that this fact does not change the moral landscape.
Re:41? (Score:1, Insightful)
It is possibly a future sale. If kids learn your software and then they get hired, they may have the company purchase a real copy. If they don't know how to use it, there is no future sale possibility.
Re:41? (Score:3, Insightful)
So it is hurting the industry, but not as much as the industry claims.
Suppose a record sells 1,000,000 copies. In order for that to drop to 999,000 copies, there would have to be about 2,500,000 unauthorized downloads (by the worst estimate offered). So, record companies still make 99.9% of their "owed" income as long as downloaders only outnumber purchasers by a factor of 2.5:1.
The RIAA member corporations want to assrape the constitution for this? To hell with 'em.
Software bought by auction? (Score:4, Insightful)
So they are counting "Used Software" as Pirated Software? Most software sold by auctions were used once and then sold via an auction to the lowest bidder. If one sold a book via an auction, it would not be considered pirated, but selling software via an auction is considered pirated? Some software sold via auction is still new and never used, is that pirated software as well? If so how is that different from a friend of mine buying the software new and then giving the copy to me to use as he bought two copies one for him and one for me to use. Is it pirated software then?
Re:BSA invents statistics - higher ethics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Me too, i specifically go for pirate copies of various things because they are typically free of phone home programs, onerous install requirements (eg license codes) and onerous runtime requirements (like putting the cd in the drive - who wants to carry around a stack of low capacity media like cds?)... The pirate copies are better, the fact that they're cheaper is secondary.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, 6 years later, I was able to talk my boss into buying a few extra special toolboxes for the work we do. Something close to $30k a seat a year. Had I never 'pirated' all that software I would have never been able to sell my self to my company, nor sell my company on Matlab toolboxes.
That's makes you part of the problem. If you and everyone like you boycotted Matlab, they would go out of business and someone with less onerous licensing could take over the industry. No snowflake in an avalanche feels responsible.
BSA credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
As always, it is unclear just what they consider "pirated". For example, if your company purchases 100% legitimate software via eBay, the BSA will not accept this as your software during an audit. They refuse to accept any and all eBay receipts. Hence, it is quite likely that they have counted all purchases via auction sites as pirated, even though this is clearly not true.
This is only one of many "rules" they apply that make little or no sense. Did you know that possessing the complete packaging of a program, including the original CD/DVD and the enclosed license certificate is, according to the BSA, not proof of ownership? You must have an original receipt, with the company (or individual) name correctly spelled, which explicitly lists the product and version.
The BSA may once have been a way to combat piracy'it has evolved into a monstrosity. Microsoft, Adobe and the other companies should terminate their relationships with it and start over.
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's true that piracy is hurting the industry (be that software, games, music or movies). Yeah it would be nice if all of that would be free, but it's not a good model to sustain the development and producment.
So if Jimmy the Geeklet pirates Windows and Photoshop and MS Office, and then when he grows up to be James the Geek with a real job he already knows Windows and MS Office and Photoshop and expects to be able to use those at work and maybe even buys copies (err, licenses) for his own use at home, this is a net loss to the "industry" compared to his knowing and wanting to use KDE and the GIMP and Open Office?
Re:41? (Score:5, Insightful)
I simply have to point out that very little of the world's population makes anywhere NEAR "$80-120 an hour". Living in SW Arkansas, I don't think that I could find anyone making 120, but I might find a few making nearly 80. The highest paid individual in my extended family makes a little less than 30, and most make 12 or less. In fact, more than 1/2 make well under $10/hour.
Pricing schemes look a whole lot different to a man who can purchase a game for one hour's wages, as opposed to a man who has to spend a day's wages for the same game. Especially considering that people who make $10/hr have little if any savings or investments.
Just something to think about.