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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?"
The BSA is exactly that, a Business Software Alliance. It doesn't serve the end user, it serves the corporations, the difference between this and other 'agencies' is that it makes no attempt to hide this. The BSA supports draconian measures like the DMCA, they'd probably like even stricter legislation. They represent corporate greed, they 'blackmail' companies into paying for huge site licenses to cover all the workstations and then some, or face a 'software audit' in which they'll no doubt find some violations. Have a 100 machine site license and a hundred machines, but just bought that new desktop for the boss? Lost the paperwork for the server in the corner?
Tobacco companies fund studies that find that Ciggarette smoking is less dangerous than playing golf in a thunderstorm, the BSA fudges facts to make Pirates seem like the scum of the Earth. The music industry and the 'software' industry have yet to realize that inflated prices lead to inflated piracy. Personally, i'm of the mind that if you make money with software, you should purchase that software. Some companies are alright with this as well, think of the thousands of script kiddies with their pirated versions of photoshop, they were never going to buy it in the first place.. Adobe cares about that printshop, or the graphics design place.. and most of these places wouldn't touch a pirated version of Photoshop with a ten-foot pole. They don't need the BSA to police them, at best the BSA makes a huge hassle, people decide that paying thousands of dollars a year to Microsoft for a site license is insane and switch to something free, many times open-source. Their draconian policies and scare tactics have probably won more converts than a slick red hat ad.
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How much of a drain does the application software (as opposed to high-end and/or custom software, which if anything could be HELPED by free software...SOMEONE is getting paid to adapt that software to an organization's needs) industry put on the economy, compared to the benefits it offers?
How many jobs will be created in businesses that rely upon commercial application software as a result of costs cut through cheaper software?
Shouldn't free software, apart from it's impacts on the application software industry, be seen just like tax cuts are?
Well, unless tax cuts aren't all they're cracked up to be.
"We ask respondents to choose from a very long list of specific software titles, reporting which ones they regularly use. This means we identify Microsoft Word versus, say, WordPerfect," says Metafacts principal analyst Dan Ness.
Open-source competitors are not included as alternatives, he says.
So, do they assume that because x% of users say they don't have a licenced copy of one of Word/WordPerfect/etc, then some percent of this percentage MUST have an unlicenced copy of one of the above? What about people who just don't use Word Processors, or Spreadsheets, or whatever? Seems to be some fishy maths going on here! The article doesn't clarify what's going on.
It's a hacked version of item 5.1 on this page. They're referring to piracy, not open source.
... given that the BSA has defined piracy as "downloading software without paying for it" before. Having a bit of a narrow view on the world, aren't we?
Of course, software (and everything else) should be payed for. Nobody should give something of value away and not charge for it -- you're underselling if you do, and that's unfair to the good people who are trying to make a profit here. How else are we going to have a healthy ecosystem of goods and services?
In these tight times, citizens should not be harming the economy that way. All those ways in which a good transaction is still wasted today! People playing music for their friends, without purchasing records. Walking in parks with just trees and no shops. Reading books without advertising. Come on people, these models are just not viable anymore.
We should teach people that giving things away is stealing from the economy. It's simply unethical.
All generalizations are false, including this one. (Mark Twain)
that they didn't factor in Open Source. It would have lessened their argument, and it's bad enough as is. Besides, piracy figures from the BSA and similar bodies have always been - at most - one notch above reading tea-leaves.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
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.
Hey, I always use
ls -lart
Just saying it like it are.
Harsh. If you purchase a product then the very least you should do is purchase the correct number of licences. This is the nature of commercial software after all.
Have a 100 machine site license and a hundred machines, but just bought that new desktop for the boss? Lost the paperwork for the server in the corner?
Then you're one hundred percent in the wrong. When you're an organisation you should be keeping detailed records (after all you probably do when it concerns money owed to you).
You can't use lazyness and sloppyness as an excuse for violating a licence. Whatever that licence is.
If someone used that excuse as a reason for violating the GPL, I doubt it would wash - so why do you think it should the other way?
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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.)
Im sorry, the article mentions Napster as a source of software?!?! Not only does napster not exist anymore, but it never shared software....
Could someone please use the cluebat on the BSA?
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Have someone inform BSA that the FSF office is actually using pirated word processors for all their work. Let them ask for an audit, and try to force the matter. Immediate self-lart, with lots of publicity for both parts!
In Murphy We Turst
and you will come to the following conclusion :
open source = no profit (most of the time)
piracy = no profit
since
no profit = no profit
it follows
open source = piracy
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.)
The BSA is NOT a government agency, they have no real abilities outside of having a fleet of overpaid lawyers and a buttload of money to blackmail or assult a company with. remember these words... the Business Software Alliance is Nothing but another Company.
And this company is paid to make money for the companies that pay them. Of course they are lying about how much piracy is happening. Of course they publish false and misleading information about the amount of money lost due to piracy. Of course they include linux, BSD, Open BeOS, Samba, Open office, Abiword, Gimp and everything else that is 100% free AND popular in their numbers. It inflates them and makes the lies they publish previousally look even better.
Remember the Business Software Alliance is nothing more than a paid extortion racket. If they threaten your company you should never let them in without a judge-signed search warrant.
They ARE NOT A GOVERNMENT AGENCY! Unlike OSHA who is, they have ZERO legal power and ZERO rights above what you have. Fight the bastards and make them spend their money to get in your building, and then be sure to sue for lost revinue, destruction of property, and public defamation.
Thank you, This post is brought to you by the Council to stop freeware piracy. "Remember every time you pirate a freeware program you hurt...Ummm... well you hurt someone!"
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That's debatable. What isn't debatable is that the vast majority of their income is derived from the huge fines etc that they levy even if their victim then buys a site licence.
The motivation is all wrong: the BSA (and in Oz, the BSAA) stand to make more from hurting people than from helping software companies.
Here in Oz at least, when they send an audit demand, the correct answer is `ummm...' followed by some hurried quick checking. If the checking ain't too disastrous, you proceed to `OK, send your guys around when you're ready' - you see, the EULA gives them the right to audit, not the right to force you to audit.
If they do bother to come around, you make everything as difficult as possible, e.g. by only allowing them to audit a machine when the user is present (privacy regulations, you see), then arranging for a skeleton staff when they do arrive so that the minimum number of computers are available for checking, and make finding out who `owns' a computer as difficult as possible. Meanwhile, all the time, so sorry, wish we could hurry things along a little but can't break these rules.
Depending on your situation, you should be able to cut them down to six computers a day or less. Over 3 working man-weeks to audit a hundred-screen shop. Make them earn their fines. And keep harping on about your reliable Linux servers, your bulletproof OpenBSD network machines, and how you're testing Linux Terminal Server technology for your desktops and wondering whether it's worthwhile cutting over to it...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
As a "rampant free market ideologue" (Libertarian), I will be the first to point out that you have confused the meaning of free-market economics (i.e. capitalism), which implies the absence of government interference (coercion) in the market, with a hypothetical regulation, imposed through coercion, which happens to favor one particular group over another. Capitalism does not necessarily imply profit but only the absence of coercion in the market. Free market economics is grounded in voluntary cooperation, not coercion (which is the definining prerequisite of any government). Hence, open source software falls squarely into the category of free-market enterprise, and in fact, to a greater degree than any software vendor which relies on patent law to sustain a business model. (Patent law, you may be surprised to know, is contrary to the true principles of free market economics, because it is derived from coercion.)
See free-market.net if you are interested...
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.
On the one hand, Microsoft attacks free software (mainly because it's bad for Microsoft's business plans, so it seems.) On the other hand, while free software has a strong hold in certain sectors -and a bid for certain desktop uses- Microsoft continues to aggressively price upward their offerings to businesses.
They're driving IT departments toward free software. Self-defeating in other words, particularly considering today's economy and business climate, where IT budgets are not faring well.
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And what about in third world countries. It sounds like they can not even install a proprietary operating system, simply because the price is not adjusted to their economy. No wonder piracy is such a large problem there. I see no ethical problem here, either.
Many third world countries have no copyright law, and so discussions of piracy are totally inappropriate there. Without copyright there is no piracy, regardless of what is actually happening. This is another way that the BSA, et al, distort the truth of piracy. They list all this activity going on in countries that have no copyright law and call it piracy.
Anyway, just a thought I figured I should throw into the mix.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.