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Free Software Inflates BSA's Piracy Claims
crazney writes: "According to this article in The Age, the BSA do not count the effect of free software when calculating piracy rates. The article suggests that free software has made piracy statistics look worse and hence encourages governments to create harsher laws ... Could someone pass The BSA a cluebat?"
bah those BSA figures have always been wrong. I mean not everyone that has a pirated program installed on their computer would necessary buy it if he couldnt get warez version. If all those billions that are lost acording to their figures were true most companyies would be bankrupt by now.
By spending money on free software
A quick web search turns up this original version:
http://www.howtotell.com/ww/bsa.asp
For the link-paranoid, replace "free software" with "pirate software" to get the original text.
The actual piracy rates are a wild guess as it is. Its based on the number of applications they expect to sell. Since piracy has been around for at least as long as computers, this figure has never been calculated from a static value.
While it is true that they ask people what software they use, a lot of people genuinely don't know. They'll say Word when they have StarOffice
I suspect the BSA is run by rampant free market ideologues. If you pressed them about their philosophy, they would probably say something like that open source software is a threat to the free enterprise system and mostly copies commercial software; while open source may not be illegal, maybe it should be.
Don't expect to be able to reason with those people. Oppose their claims with facts whereever you can, and expose the irrationality and inefficiency of their model of software distribution.
Yes and No.
... MS knows they can easily charge "corporation X" and not "citizen X", so they don't ever "audit" peoples homes. But they will when they evaluate they can get value added from it (ie: discounted cash flow triggered by anti-piracy@home [including all side effects such as riots, bad PR, etc.]). If they haven't done so, it's because they are better off charging corps than everyone.
Yes. Also, people lets Word before they even find htier first job. Of course, that may mean the use Word because that's what their employer will value.
No. Your boss uses Word and probably has a pirated copy at home. Every office runs Word because they know employees (high or low rank) will be able t pirate Office to make the homework.
So that leads me to the conclusion that if NOBODY ever had even the slightest chance of getting an Office without actually paying for it, you'll have like (my guess) 80% of the computer-litetare US population outright complaining about this overpriced piece of crap being imposed to them.
BUT OF COURSE
And you can't (sucessfully) argue that Openoffice would greatly benefit from BSA starting an large scale antipiracy crusade at companies AND home users.
unfinished: (adj.)
Do you know this for a fact?
The BSA and the SPA are not the same as the mpaa. For example I know the SPA is very anti-Microsoft which I find surprising. They are also very pro technology and are probably against the dmca. Remember that software companies do not like closed computers unless they are in the entertainment sector.
Here goes my karma( gulp).
I know they sound really evil and are unpopular but they have a right to protect software companies. Remember that whether you like it or not software companies need to be paid and you cannot pirate or steal their work. This is especially true for corporations. Script kiddies are far from their minds. The BSA wont be slamming down your door anytime soon for bootlegging like the mpaa plans to, but corporations need to pay for the software they use. Especially if they can afford it. Using someone else's software without compensation is stealing. I know many of you reading this are college students who are poor and are scoffing at this but realize that hundreds of programmers at these software companies need a paycheck. How would you like it if your employer only partially compensated you for writing code?
All that the BSA does is make sure the software companies are adequately compensated for their particular licenses. They do not have the intention of ripping off the public. To them if a software company is stupid enough to over charge then it's the software company's problem and not theirs. For example Oracle has ridiculously expensive and outrageous pricing. Guess what? They no longer even have %50 marketshare anymore. SQL Server, Mysql, and DB2 are catching up.
If you think its too expensive or the license is outrages, then don't buy it. Purchase Linux or cheaper alternatives. I oppose piracy and I believe piracy is hurting free software rather then helping it. Borland as well as Linux would have greater marketshare if people stopped pirated Visual Studio and Windows. Remember that its not greed when a software company overcharges. Its stupidity. Oracle is a prime example of that.
http://saveie6.com/
Then who they serve, some of us might wonder.
In case you haven't been 'harrassed' by BSA before, they'll first send your company a letter to offer 'free audit' of your computer system, failure to comply might result in legal action. They seem to have their way to get the local government(even outside US) to their side and they could really get the court warrent if they like. Therefore most companies would let them in.
They wouldn't take immediate action when they caught your company using software you are not licensed for(well, it always be the case in a big company). However, within three days M$ would mysterically 'see' your difficulities and offered you a 5 years lock-in contract in order to waive your legal responsibility of using unlicense software. Great, you don't need to face that 2 years jailing and $5000 fine for each unlicensed software used.
How nice they are...but wait, how did M$ know my situation, where did they get our information? It shouldn't be BSA, they promised to our government that the information they got from our Government are kept confidential, and M$ sales said they just do the cold call it. Well, is that my guardian angel save me again by giving an emergency call to M$?
While the example might have been bad, the message still rings true: being sure that all machines contain properly licensed software is nearly impossible. Unless a system like Palladium were installed to prevent employees from messing with their computers, hence preventing any possible violations, there is no feasible way to handle the issue. Things like a full time staff for restoring workstations to a base state, requiring all users to save data to a central work area, and hiring a full time staff to fully investigate the ever changing EULAs set down by the possibly 20+ (at least) commercial products is at best a stop gap which still leaves much to be desired. Site licenses might help but are infeasible especially against covering random software that users install. A police state of enforcement against employees would not work either, as even in the most tyrannical government, there is always dissidence. In the end, however, the cheapest solution would be to use free software, which would require lack of almost all the previous obligations and costs.
RMS probably wouldn't care much how people act if there were no software copyrights or patents. As long as there are, he needs to protect his software from exploitation by commercial interests. In both cases, if you don't like the license, don't use it.
It's amusing how much Objectivist philosophy infests both of the self-selected "sides" in this debate. The only thing that they *don't* agree on is "who gets to be Henry Reardon".
Open source software isn't about commercial success or individual aggrandizement, it's about everybody's right to use and share ideas. There is no "Henry Reardon" in open source software.
What if someone with some free time and willing to donate some work would put a website that:
1 - calculated OOS installed based (using their same methods or the ones that'd fit us best)
2- estimated a price similar to one of closed source alternative in other plataforms, that achieved the same tasks
3 - calculate estimated total sales in a BSA likewise fashion
We would then be able to say:
* How much money corporations and customers are saving by using OSS
How much productivity is OSS contributing to the US economy
* How much taxes is OSS producing (based to the fact that 35% of all savings turn into Income Tax + all the indirect taxes collected due to the 65% remaining income beign either used for consumption or investment)
Someone could contribute another posibles good uses of these figures, to fight back BSA arguments and better inform our politicians and the media.
unfinished: (adj.)
What difference does it make if you rip the music yourself or download it from another machine, if you've got the physical medium in the first place?
1) They don't need a warrant or anything like it. While I don't neessiarly think they need something like a search warrant, they should ahve to present a case to a judge showing that they have sufficient reason to believe that you do indeed have pirated software. Also, they should be limited (as in the case of a search warrant) to auditing the software packages they have evidence are pirated and nothing else.
2) You have to pay for it. When the audit happens, your people have to prove to them that you have paid for your software. This costs money. They should be required to reimburse you for all staff time spent doing the audit. After all, they are the ones that want it done.
3) There needs to be a reasonable age limit on software they can audit. I'd say no more than four yeats. You just can't keep records forever, after awhile they need to be destroyed to make space. I work for a university department that isn't too big (say 100-150 people total) and four years of our finincial records occupies a filing cabnet, several huge binders, and a number of boxes.
Also, I don't know what they BSA accepts as "proof" but I feel that it needs to be whatever kind of record your company keeps (within reason). So if you have POs that show orders for the software, they need to accept that. Many software does not come with adiquate physical documentation of a liscence and for large orginazition there are no reciepts other than the PO papework often.
Basically, from what I've read about BSA audits, I just feel they have too much authority. They should need to go to a judge, present convincing evidence that you have pirated software. All the software they want to audit must not be more than four years old. Then the judge issues an order for an audit, limited ot the software they presented a case for. Then, the BSA orders teh audit, and pays the costs. They are then reqired the accept the documentation your present, so long as it is reasonable (ie not handwritten notes).
So if an employee reported that their company was pirating Windows 98 the BSA would have to take their sworn statement to a judge, the judge would then allow an audit for Windows 98 only. If then during the course of the audit the company produces credit card recipts proving they indeed purchased all their copies, the matter is over and the BSA has to go away, after reimbursing them for audit costs.
If a system like this was the case, I'd have no real trouble. They couldn't then use audits as bully tactics and would only be able to go after people they had some reason to believe were breaking the law. I do think it's only fair given our country's presumption of innonce laws.
About their estimate of the "demand" for software:
- "PC shipments by state were estimated from a detailed review of the employment and population of each state and market research that surveyed the PC penetration rate of each state."
- "These estimates of software applications [...] were allowed to vary slightly by state. They were then applied to the state PC shipment estimates to form state-specific software demand estimates."
About their estimate of the "supply" of software:- "This data was compiled only for software applications that were studied in the "2000 BSA Global Software Piracy Study". [...] The resulting shipment data was uplifted to reflect shipments for the entire software industry."
The difference between "supply" and "demand" is defined to be the "piracy".For the retail value of the software (the larger number often quoted by the media) they added 22% on top of that.
Moderated troll? That's pretty suspect... He seems to hit the nail on the head.
Yeah, well, it probably wasn't the nail that particular moderator wanted hit...
It seems to have been sorted now though.