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Software Piracy United States

High IQ Countries Have Less Software Piracy, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com) 249

Posted by msmash from the why-do-we-pirate-stuff,-Mr.-Wayne? dept.
Ernesto Van der Sar, writing for TorrentFreak (edited and condensed): There are hundreds of reasons why people may turn to piracy. A financial motive is often mentioned, as well as lacking legal alternatives. A new study from a group of researchers now suggests that national intelligence can also be added to the list. In a rather straightforward analysis, the research examined the link between national IQ scores and local software piracy rates -- from data provided by the Business Software Alliance. They concluded that there's a trend indicating that countries with a higher IQ have lower software piracy rates.
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High IQ Countries Have Less Software Piracy, Research Finds More

High IQ Countries Have Less Software Piracy, Research Finds

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  • Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)

    by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @02:53PM (#52354183) Homepage
    IQ scores are more or less meaningless in this context. A nation does not have an "IQ".

    In this context, at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.

    • IQ scores are more or less meaningless in this context. A nation does not have an "IQ".

      In this context, at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.

      I'm right there with you.

      I suspect that here on Slashdot there will be many posts trying to correlate the posters' own IQ and their views on intellectual property.

      • 14/14 or bust. Hmm, wonder if i could get into national office with that slogan.

      • Funniest part is, there is a vast difference between intelligence (which an IQ test purports to reflect) and wisdom (which is more often than not the actual driving force in an individual's decision to "pirate" or not.)

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          It's much wiser to pirate [funnyjunk.com]

          We got burnt by this crap just last weekend for my kid's birthday party. My ex-wife bought a movie online the morning before the party instead of trorrenting it the night before like I told her to. The projector didn't support the DRM.

          Sorry kids, no movie for you even though we paid for it legally.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          How does one measure "wisdom" objectively?
          Or rather; what evidence supports your claim?

          • Look at it this way: You can be the world's top meteorologist, know everything there is to know about precipitation (including the 48 different words for it in some tribal language)...

            ...but you still have to be wise enough to come in out of the rain, no?

          • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Funny)

            by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @06:19PM (#52355853) Journal

            How does one measure "wisdom" objectively?

            It's usually on the player's character sheet, sandwiched between Intelligence and Charisma.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hodet ( 620484 )

            By talking to the person. It becomes obvious rather quickly.

          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Megol ( 3135005 )

            Isn't it more interesting to ask how one measures intelligence? I for one don't trust IQ tests - seeing those more as a kind of measure of puzzle solving abilities, not problem solving ability.

            One example (I have more) of what I mean is those transposing/rotating symbol puzzles where I see some kind of manipulation as the natural one and the puzzle constructor sees another one as the right one. My solution is simpler (less manipulation) but still "wrong". To get a high score i'd have to _learn_ how to "prop

        • wisdom (which is more often than not the actual driving force in an individual's decision to "pirate" or not.)

          I think the word you are looking for is "ethic" instead of "wisdom." ;)

    • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:00PM (#52354279)

      In this instance (if the correlation is legit), it's more likely that it stems from a better educated population being able to afford to buy software, as opposed to having to illegally copy it.

      • Spot on.

      • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)

        by buchner.johannes ( 1139593 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @04:29PM (#52355093) Homepage Journal

        Correlation is not causation, therefore there are many possible explanation. Wealth correlates with IQ (better education but also nutrition), and wealth probably correlates with piracy. Out comes a correlation of IQ and piracy.

      • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)

        by skids ( 119237 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @04:40PM (#52355175) Homepage

        My money would be on a better educated population realizing that a larger proportion of available software is utter crap, and not wanting it in the first place.

      • Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @05:41PM (#52355649) Homepage Journal

        Look at the position of China. Higher IQ than the US, but also a very high piracy rate.

        It's obvious what this graph is actually showing. In general, more affluent countries have both better education and more money to spend on software. The exception is countries like China where they have a very efficient public school system but also low wages.

      • I would question the legitimacy of the correllation.

        Higher IQ scores (and higher testing scores in general) are already strongly correllated with affluence.

        This result is like an artifact of affluence. Richer people tend to be better nourished and exposed to more novel stimuli as children, as well as getting better educations. They tend to score higher on standardized tests, and IQ scores are just results from standardized tests.

        Richer people are better able to afford expensive software and media. As a cons

      • Correlation does not imply cause. Further, what other factors (such as higher GDP per capita, level of disposable income in the middle class, poor with access to technology, and so on) influence levels or piracy. Until you have an exhaustive list of correlated factors (rather than just one), it is unwise to do anything other than indicate you have a correlation. This is stuff that I was taught at GCSE, A-level and university level statistics.

        Two are from business schools, one from an economics school. Doesn

    • Also wealth, education levels, reproductive rates, lower crime in general, etc. Correlation is not causation, but man does it make for some headlines!

      • came for this. The summary is misleading:

        There are hundreds of reasons why people may turn to piracy. A financial motive is often mentioned, as well as lacking legal alternatives. A new study from a group of researchers now suggests that national intelligence can also be added to the list.

        but then it says this:

        They concluded that there's a trend indicating that countries with a higher IQ have lower software piracy rates.

        correlation is not causation! I suspect that the nations "with higher IQs" are advanced economies, and people from "lower IQ" developing economies can't afford first world prices for photoshop and ms word.

      • Reproductive rates are correlated with piracy??? Whoa, now that's a headline! People who pirate software are more fertile!

    • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:02PM (#52354301)

      A nation does not have an "IQ"

      There *are* nations other than the US, ya know?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Or charge it to marketing.

      I mean, if you want to embarrass a nation with high piracy (say, China),you can do it by basically insulting them.

      I mean, by saying this, you're automatically saying a nation like the US has higher IQ than China (piracy rates of 50% and under, and over 90%, respectively).

      Goal being that the Chinese are to be insulted so badly that they change their ways

      • Goal being that the Chinese are to be insulted so badly that they change their ways

        Summary suggested me the same question: do they mean chineese people are stupid?

        But look at the data in the article: China does not match the fit. It seats far in upper right quadrant, featuring both high IQ and high piracy.

    • Re:Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:10PM (#52354407)

      In other news: "IQ tests actually measure wealth"

      • In other news: "IQ tests actually measure wealth"

        Supposedly they corrected for wealth.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What about China though? Higher IQ than the US, but much lower average income and wealth. Of course they have a pretty good public school system, being socialist... Perhaps it's better to say that IQ correlates with education, which suggests it isn't really measuring IQ at all, and that wealth isn't the only way to provide a good education.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jmv ( 93421 )

      It's OK, they didn't look at the average IQ, they only looked at the percentage of the population above median IQ.

    • Re:Meaningless (Score:4, Informative)

      by Prof G ( 578341 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @05:58PM (#52355749)
      And any data provided by the BSA is pure bunk. Hence, the study is meaningless for anything other than BSA marketing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mojo66 ( 1131579 )
      Not meaningless. It is well known that on Macs, piracy is much lower than on Windows, as well as iOS vs Android. Since higher IQ means higher wealth means more Apple products, this makes all sense.

    • And not just any standardized tests, but the specific questions and format used for the IQ test.

      IQ is mostly only useful for comparing people with the same demographics and background (e.g. same culture, same education). Even then it's not a great measure because it's only loosely-correlated with anything useful (e.g. how successful a person will be at doing a particular job).

      Huge ethical problems arise when comparing different populations on IQ tests. In particular, IQ tests are a favorite go-to for raci

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sudon't ( 580652 )

      IQ scores are more or less meaningless in this context. A nation does not have an "IQ".

      In this context, at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.

      There's that, and how this national IQ quotient correlates to higher wages/better jobs. That is to say, more money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      And even if true, higher intelligence often equates to more affluent... People are more likely to pirate if they cannot afford to buy, or aren't sufficiently aware about cheaper/free alternatives.

    • In this case it can be representative of a nation's level of development, and therefore personal income/wealth. So the study may simply indicate that there is an inverse relationship between affordability and piracy.

    • Poor people are dumber. This is because poor people have not been exposed to the environmental factors which cultivate intelligence. Poor people can't afford to buy expensive software. Countries in which the highest rate of survival goes to rape gangs and drug smuggling networks would have the highest rate of software piracy.

  • High IQ People.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jimtheowl ( 4200185 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @02:53PM (#52354185)
    ... are more likely to use open source software.

    • Came here to say this, it makes perfect sense. It's people who don't know what they're doing who have to pirate Office or Windows because they don't know that there are better options or have trouble learning to use different software.

    • I would agree that the average IQ of open source users is higher than 'all others'. However the pool of 'all others' is much higher....you have it backwards.

  • High IQ = Less Piracy (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Gee, considering the source, this couldn't be clumsy propaganda, could it?

  • Quoting Nassim Taleb (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iMadeGhostzilla ( 1851560 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @02:59PM (#52354265)

    One of the New Year's resolution he listed was, "Do not read the latest breakthrough experiment in psychology about, say, the effect of taking cold showers on grammatical ability. Better even read nothing about these 'experiments.'"

    • Which would be perfect in this case. Has anyone looked at TFA? That graph ... It's a pretty amazing scatterplot. Sure there is a correlation in their with some sort of horrid regression factor but just glancing at it shows you that the correlation, if it even exists, is hopelessly weak.

      They are using crappy statistics to pull out some questionable correlation of crappy data from crappy studies.

      Nothing to see here, move along.

  • Ice cream causes rape rapes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NotDrWho ( 3543773 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:04PM (#52354343)

    Every summer ice cream sales go up. Every summer reported numbers of rapes go up.

    Therefore ice cream must cause rape.

  • Didn't correlate with education? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Alok ( 37687 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:06PM (#52354371)

    > the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development.

    So they did take into account some factors like economic development, which makes this more interesting. However, why not analyze w.r.t. to the education levels of the area as well, since that would also affect the region's 'collective IQ' and probably indicate how many people are too poor to afford education, not to mention buying software. I searched the paper and 'education' as a search term only appeared twice, both times in references (so, its never mentioned in the actual text).

    The researchers probably didn't consider the prevailing views of property rights or agreement with international treaties either. In some countries, its just more culturally acceptable to share software which makes it easier to average people to do so without feeling guilty. Other countries might have low income groups that are forced to buy licenses because their leadership got some incentives for IP treaties and are eager to show their enforcement to attract more FDI. Also, often countries with limited software exposure don't even know about good alternatives so its basically, either pirate or buy what everyone else uses.

    • Go ahead, have a look at the underlying paper: https://torrentfreak.com/image... [torrentfreak.com]

      It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.

      Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they

    • Classic example of incompetent research (Score:4, Informative)

      by golodh ( 893453 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @05:56PM (#52355727)
      Go ahead, have a look at the underlying paper: https://torrentfreak.com/image... [torrentfreak.com]

      It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.

      Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they calmly rely on piracy data from those sources.

      Then their explanatory variable: the so-called IQ measure. They cite the "seminal" work of Lyn,R. VanHaanen, T ()

      Unfortunately for the authors of the latest "correlation paper", the work of Lyn and VanHaanen is anything but uncontroversial. I quote from one of the Lyn and VanHaanenpapers:

      First, we believe that these estab- lish beyond reasonable doubt the validity of our national IQ. This was initially disputed by a number of critics. For in- stance, Ervik (2003, pp. 405â"6) asked âoeare people in rich countries smarter than those in poorer countries?â and con- cluded that âoethe authors fail to present convincing evidence and appear to jump to conclusions.â Nechyba (2004, p. 1178) wrote of the âoerelatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions.â Barnett and Williams (2004, p.) rejected our national IQ as âoevirtually meaninglessâ; Volken (2003, p. 411) described them as âoehighly deficientâ; and Hunt and Sternberg (2006, pp. 133, 136) rejected them as âoetechnically inadequate⦠and meaninglessâ. The answer to these criticisms is that our national IQs are validated by their high correlations with scores in tests of mathematics, science and reading, as shown in Table 1, and also with the numerous other economic and social phenom- ena documented in subsequent tables. These high correla- tions would not be present if our national IQs were meaningless.

      Gettit? The fact that there are high correlations "proves" the validity of their inference that there are meaningful relationships. Did they go to Trump University or what?

      In this vein I especially like the high correlation (see http://www.tylervigen.com/spur... [tylervigen.com] ) between per-capita cheese consumption and people who died by becoming entangled in their bedsheets.

      I wonder if the authors thought to control for that.

      As far as serious research is concerned, this is the end of the line, but lets go on and have a look at their model, shall we?

      They model the value of a fraction through a straightforward regression model: SP_i = \alpha + \beta IQ_i + \lambda X_i + \epsilon_i

      Oops, and there we have the little matter of using straightforward regression to model a fraaaaction, instead of something like logistic regression. For those who don't immediately spot the problem, see e.g. here: http://www.theanalysisfactor.c... [theanalysisfactor.com]

      Ordinary linear models are simply unsuitable to model fractions. A point that's common knowledge with statisticians, but one that's apparently lost on the authors (and the authors on which they base their work).

      Right, lets continue and look at the graph they show with their regression line. Each country counts as one (China has the same weight as the e.g. Senegal and the US has the same weight as the Comores. Look ma, no weights! Sounds good eh? When you look at their graph, China shows up as one serious outlier with an "IQ" score of about 110 and a "piracy" score of about 80%. Only 1 bln people up there. Close by, in the bottom-right corner of their graph is the good ole US of A, weighing in at about 270 mln people, with almost the same score

  • It doesn't surprise me that the Slashdot audience has forgotten who the Business Software Alliance is, but I'm a little shocked that TorrentFreak seems to have.

  • What about complex licenses where is it's easy to be listed as piracy due to not using the right ones or not following all of the very complex rules.

  • I suspect high-IQ countries are just so good at piracy that they make it look like somebody else did it.

  • Most content comes from "developed" nations because such nations have more entertainment consumers and people who can afford devices to play/run content. Therefore such nations have a vested interest in reinforcing intellectual property (IP). Piracy thus "hurts" the less-developed nations less, and therefore there is less incentive to enforce IP laws there.

    Developed nations generally have higher average IQ's because they have better education systems and better average nutrition.

    These two factors are likely

  • Research can say anything you want. For example... Lets say that those high "IQ" nations also most likely have the highest income levels. Meaning, another way to say this "research" shows that poorer nations pirate more software, which seems reasonable when you consider that these same people probably can't afford the software licenses and/or do not have companies that they work for that can actually buy the software. "Hackers" don't typically hack software because they are bad or low IQ people. They

  • Wouldn't many pirates' actual country of origin be hidden by the VPN they are using? So their findings are skewed, and there's no way to tell by how much. But I'm guessing the folks who commissioned this "study" don't want to be showing that VPN is a viable pirate attack vector anyway.

  • About saying country A has a higher IQ than country B.

  • Seriously, this is just a taunting and a very bad one to say the least.

    Just read the 29 pages of this "study", I just flipped it through and laughed.

    If someone would have looked at the data supporting this conclusion, one would say that even a six year old that is taught how to "insert a trend line" into excel could come up with this conclusion.

    Ohh yeah, but there is a correlation matrix .. (*laughter*)

    Another conclusion that could be drawn (or painted) based on this data, is that people of colour are dumb,

  • We find things. We are smart.

  • BSA (Score:2)

    by Holi ( 250190 )
    Since when are we taking anything the BSA claims without a dump truck load of salt.
  • There's no other viable explanation for this "story".

  • Just look at their graph. It's a big, uncorrelated smudge of dots - through which they have drawn a line and announced their conclusion. The data is worthless, the analysis is worthless.

    Take a look at the publications for the first author:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lzywJN4AAAAJ&hl=en

    Looks like a good part of his career consists of plotting various things against IQ in search of things that correlate. IQ is a dubious enough metric for intelligence already, and there's no possible way to de

  • There is nothing even remotely scientific about this.
    Firstly the IQ test was originally developed by a French doctor in the late 1800's as a way of diagnosing mental retardation. It was never meant to be an intelligence test. It's a stupidity test.
    Secondly for an IQ test to have any meaning it has to be conducted in a way that is culturally relevant to the place your doing the testing. So comparing IQ from people of 2 different cultures doesn't tell you a whole lot because the people crafting the test a

  • Normal (Score:3)

    by denisbergeron ( 197036 ) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `noregreBsineD'> on Monday June 20, 2016 @06:39PM (#52355935)

    People with high IQ will use Linux and doesn't need piracy!

  • IQ tests tend to be culturally biased, so it would be interesting to know if the same tests are being used in both 'high IQ' and 'low IQ' countries.

    If so, my guess would be that the IQ tests are (unintentionally) biased in favor of the culture of the 'high IQ' country or countries.

    If not, then there would probably be no point in comparing the test results as the tests themselves are different.

    Google 'IQ test cultural bias' for a bunch of links around this.

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