BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B In 2009 350
alphadogg sends a NetworkWorld.com piece going over the Business Software Alliance's latest stats on software theft around the world. "Expanding PC sales in emerging markets is increasing the rate of software piracy, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC. The rate of global software piracy in 2009 was 43%, meaning that for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold in 2009, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software also made its way into the market. This is a 2-percentage-point increase from 2008. Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009, according to the BSA. IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into 'ailing economies.' ... In the United States, software piracy remained at 20%, the lowest level of software theft of any nation in the world. ... The PC markets in Brazil, India, and China accounted for 86% of the growth in PC shipments worldwide." The BSA president said, "Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products." It's unclear whether that was a brag about the industry's robustness, or a result of the industry's low cost of goods sold.
Lost sales? (Score:2, Interesting)
My question is always: how much of this would have been purchased if it hadn't been stolen?
Specifically, I'm referring to things like college kids downloading the full version of Photoshop. There's no way those kids are shelling out $500 (or whatever it is) for a full Photoshop license. If they steal it, they just wouldn't have it at all.
From the article, it sounds like it's a case of people acquiring alternatives to software they would purchase--for instance, Windows, or graphics design firms pirating Photoshop. I would wager that nations like China have the highest instances of these sorts of offenses, and that medium-sized businesses are the largest culprits of software theft.
Re:Don't worry, they are working on a solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Which is funny, because this is what our main competitor "runs in the cloud" and we're fielding calls daily with their customers wanting to know how soon can they deploy our locally running software because it's faster and they can still work even if their internet connection goes down.
BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B - Meanwhile (Score:5, Interesting)
BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B - Meanwhile...
The IT world says "security issues in Windows requiring IT or Tech work exceeds "Theft" figure many times over".
...nope, I am not complaining... I work in the tech field... as much as I would love to hate Microsoft, I have to hate the fact that I love them. I for one am thrilled that .NET and other "technologies are so easy to exploit. I'm also happy I have karma to burn ;-)
I am very curious how they come up with these figures though. At an average of $100 a piece of software, that's 510 million pirated copies a year. At $200 avg, it's 255 million copies... and so on. Wow... didnt realize it was such a serious issue...
Would the IRS accept this writeoff? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lost sales? (Score:3, Interesting)
. . . which results in reduced future sales because they would either go with a less expensive package like Paint Shop Pro, or better yet, go with Gimp. Today's piracy leads to tomorrow's sales and business-wide deployments and that is very likely how a big factor in how today's big players got to where they are now.
So, go ahead and clamp down on piracy - those of us who don't "steal"[sic] and instead choose open source will win because open source will gain a larger foothold in the market, and the more poor, starving students who use open source today will be strongly encouraging their employers/businesses/etc. to choose open source as well.
Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullshit. Pure and simple.
Rainbows and unicorns... (Score:3, Interesting)
It must be nice to live in a make believe land.
Don't forget Canada, we be all evil and stuff up here!
I am pretty sure you can draw a strong correlation between the fact that the average income in those countries is about 100$ compared to about 50,000$ in the USA. Last I checked a retail copy of Windows 7 is about 200$.
If your having a hard time drawing a conclusion as to why all the piracy, well your not really trying.
Re:Don't worry, they are working on a solution (Score:1, Interesting)
No, silly.
If you put $51 Billion into the system and the net result is 500,000 new jobs, you're talking half a million jobs at $102,000 each! Even with benefits, you could hire an American for that, (provided you avoided union workers).
If they were talking Indian jobs, the figure would be closer to 5 million jobs, and Chinese would probably be closer to 20 million.
Re:This just in: (Score:2, Interesting)
Software industry has lowest per unit cost/fixed cost ratio in the world...
Even if you count the 90-day tech support contract that comes with a legit copy of a program?
Nobody who isn't a corporate buisness cares about that, and I should know, because I do that 'tech support' (read: fixing the damn thing) for everyone I know indefinitely. I claim 500 hours of stolen time back from Microsoft! Few if any individuals would be able to withstand that amount of lost wages!
Re:This just in: (Score:2, Interesting)
yeah, tech support that is only necessary because of all the bloatware "features", ease of exploitation (shoddy product), and DRM / product licensing headaches. and like another poster pointed out, support cost is eaten by the hardware OEM most of the time, since so few people buy boxed copies of windows. My next copy (since I play certain games which only function on windows) will, however, be boxed because of how terribad OEM "system restore" CDs are. And i'll never need the "support".
Re:Lost sales? (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly - people take the money they don't spend on overpriced software and use it on other things (eating out, nice clothes, something for the house, a new computer, new tv, whatever) and if those people were forced to pay for those items (and were somehow unable to simply choose not to use them), it would simply mean that $51 billion would disappear from the rest of the economy and go into software. Claiming that it would result in jobs is a fallacious argument because they are ignoring all the money that wouldn't be spent on other things as a result of people spending more on software.
The solution? Stop overcharging for software (which is a huge motivation for the average person to pirate software such as Windows or Office) - charge reasonable prices and people will be much more likely to buy your product than pirate it. I think Malwarebytes is a great example of not overcharging - most AV software wants $60 and then $50 a year for updates, meanwhile Malwarebytes charges nothing to get the software and only wants a one time fee of $25 for a lifetime license to use on all of your personal computers. That's why Malwarebytes is the first AV product I've ever paid money for instead of just using free alternatives - because they charged a reasonable price instead of gouging people like their competition does.
Re:BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B - Meanwhi (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your average price for a piece of software is FAR too low.
Windows: $299+ (retail, not upgrade)
Photoshop: $600+ (retail, not upgrade)
MSOffice: $300+ depending on professional/small business/enterprise
AutoCAD: $3000+
Oracle: $$$$$$$ Based on their site review ("how much does it look like your company can afford")
Three major flaws (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I can tell there are three major flaws in the calculation of this figure:
Firstly, it appears to assume a 100% conversion rate between "pirated copies" and "lost sales". As has mentioned repeatedly in other comments, this is impossible to justify.
Secondly, it seems to presuppose that the Average Selling Price that would be achieved in emerging markets like China and Brazil are the same as the current ASP that they get in the Western world where more of the software is purchased legitimately; this too is unsupportable.
Thirdly, they ascribed zero value to the marketing benefit of people "stealing" software in order to determine if they like it and then going on to buy a copy. Repeated studies in the music market have shown that people who download music buy more music and while the situations are not identical it is clear that many people get hold of pirated software to try it and then buy the software for the support that comes with a legitimate copy once they decide that it does the job. Killing illegal copies of software would therefore likely damage sales that they currently make while possibly bringing in some new sales.
Having run software businesses in the past I appreciate that seeing your hard work ripped off can be a serious problem but the BSA spreading mis-information and unsupportable assertions as if they are fact does nothing to make people believe that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving scaremongerers.
Re:Don't worry, they are working on a solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point, but...
You're off by an order of magnitude on the wages for the workers. Either they have to make $1,300 each, or the total has to be $6,500,000,000, in which case the executive bonus budget won't buy full-time attention from a single inbred asshat (sorry! typo - I meant "talented leader").
Re:Lost sales? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am going to be a devil's advocate here:
Lets say someone comes out with a 100% secure DRM. A theory could be that ACTA mandates a Fritz/Clipper like chip in every computer sold that locks software to machines, or the main OS of all computers is put under a hypervisor like the non-updated PS3s with the "Other OS" feature, with a remote kill switch that frys the machine if it thinks there there is any tampering.
What will happen? One of five things:
People would find substitutes. Developers will work on an open source solution en masse, and the software battle would shift from licensing and DRM to patent enforcement. Here, bigger companies might get behind a product so it isn't this easy one-way battle companies have with no opposition that they do with copyrights. For example, GIMP would get donations and developers. Patent enforcement is harder to enforce than copyrights, and the whack-a-mole war would begin with a program that gets slightly modified and renamed. A utility that is a clone of a commercial product may get sued out of oblivion, but if it were open source, each fork of it would have to be sued, and all it would take would be one single developer to perform a fork and call it a different name. And even though copyright infringement may be sued for millions of dollars, there are no cases of a patent violation for noncommercial use being sued into oblivion. So we would see programs spring up that are functionally identical to the commercial applications.
People will do without. If music programs got so expensive that average musicians couldn't afford them, people would go back to hardware mixers and discrete devices. People would write apps for Android and the iPad so the device can do basic music functions (loops, sampling, etc.)
The company turns into a niche vendor. The commercial product might still sell for unpurchasable prices, but only a few people in a narrow market would buy it. Yes, this would be lucrative for some businesses (AutoDesk is a good example), but there are other products which cannot thrive just on a narrow market segment. Adobe for example. If Acrobat was both rendered unpiratable and too expensive, then businesses would move wholesale to Microsoft's XPS, and print shops either install XPS to PDF converters, or they would lose out to the shops that do.
Of course, the worst thing is that this would do is create a digital divide. People who know how to use the commercial programs and who don't. In IT, this used to be common when Solaris was commercial. You would get people with Linux experience, but without the experience of Solaris/AIX/IRIX/HP-UX directly, they were always on the bottom of the list compared to someone who managed to get in a high end rendering lab and learn the basics of these operating systems.
The extreme worst case is that the commercial products be considered as premium/luxury brands, and are bought for status. If someone has a copy of a full version of a commercial application, it is considered far more stylish than any competition.
History has already shown us examples of what happens when too much DRM happens. Competitors who don't do copy-protection start coming in and grabbing large pieces of the pie. Lotus 1-2-3 got bit by this. Novell also got hit by this when people could install Windows NT, set up their domains and filesharing without having to worry about the hair-pulling license keys that Netware 3.x and 4.x had. Need more users to share files in NT Server? Just increment the number, but make sure to have a filed receipt of the CALs used, so when the BSA comes for an audit, you can show that you are authorized to use the amount of licenses.
Of course the exception to this are games, but its because people are used to games being locked down. Console DRM is almost bulletproof (XBox 360s are moddable, but get kicked off XBL left and right, PS3s are effectively uncrackable (yes, they got cracked for a little bit of time but Sony didn't just patch the crack out, but also locked
Re:Let Me Add to the List; I'm Good at This Too (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, when you take a pastry from the bakery, in your hypothetical scenario, they are deprived of that pastry. If they have 100 pastries, and 99 get stolen, they have only one left to sell. The above analogy was far better, in that, just as with any type of copying, by cooking your own you are making copies of the pastry without depriving the bakery of the originals, even if it is a flawless copy of the bakery's recipe.
I'm sure the bakery would rather you not do that, or that it be illegal to get pastries in any way but buying from them. But that doesn't mean they should be able to prevent you from doing so, if you have the technical skill to make a perfect copy of their pastries without taking any from them.
Re:Don't worry, they are working on a solution (Score:3, Interesting)
"Not even the embedded software in your life support device?"
Which we all know is rabidly pirated all over the world, yessss
Re:This just in: (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted. Perhaps they should make those available as torrents so they can cut their losses.
Re:Customers and users hate the cloud. (Score:5, Interesting)
For a car analogy, NoSQL reminds me of people who take a reciprocating saw to a car, removing all airbags and safety systems, all but one disk for brakes, cutting the roof, trunk, and doors off, then saying that their vehicle is far faster than anything else on the track, comparing their vehicle to factory stock models with all their safety systems intact.
There is a reason why SQL-based RDBMS servers are slower than NoSQL. And that is because they ensure that the data is consistent and not lost/corrupted if two things access an entry at the same time.
Eventual consistency is a nice concept. However, it assumes that a tablespace will quiesce sometime. And a lot of these databases are hit 24/7, so there is never a time that the entries (can't call them transactions) that are in flight actually are assured that they are written to disk. Of course, a failure or unexpected shutdown can happen anytime, and entries in flight that can't be considered completed, or be able to be rolled back are corrupt entries which require time to find and fix, assuming they can be detected.
If I value the integrity of data stored in a database, I'm going to use an RDBMS that is designed and built from the ground up on tried and true concepts (ACID mainly). Even if it means that it would cost more than a NoSQL solution.