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BSA IDC FUD
truthsearch writes "News.com.com is reporting that a 'study, commissioned by the BSA and conducted by IDC, found that in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors. The study, which examined 57 countries, predicted that a 10-point reduction in the rate of piracy over four years could generate 1.5 million jobs and $64 billion taxes worldwide.' The BSA, er... Microsoft, will use this study to convince governments to crack down on piracy. 'Overall, the countries that have the poorest record of IP rights have slower rates of IT growth,' BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said. Oh, and the countries with the most oppression have had the slowest IT growth, but that can't be the cause, nah."
I know someone that was audited by the BSA and decided to fight it.
Basically they countered by stating they wanted full disclosure of
who reported them so as to determine the validity of the claim prior
to wasting internal resources and dollars. They also argued that
the reporting tools are a violation of privacy. Yes, they expected
them to place some software on their network which scans their
entire network not to mention each machine's registry. Third, they
also argued that even if they were in violation of license, the
license is between them and the vendor (after all, the license does
not allow for the BSA as having legal proxy interests) and unless
the vendor in questions decides that they'd like to personally
persue the issue, the BSA does not have legal authority or the
legal grounds to persue the action. Furthermore, they argued that
even if something odd was discovered and they lost, only the
government has the right to impose fines on legal matters as such
and they would be within their legal rights to simply purchase
any outstanding licenses or settle directly with the vendor in
question and completely dismiss the BSA altogether thereby
eliminating the need to pay any fines or added fees.
The Study..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
You know you are a geek when you understand a headline of all these acronyms... :\
Thats a laugh, countries like India China have very high percentage of piracy (some stats put it above 90 %) yet have a burgeoning software industry. Albeit due to offshore development work in most parts.
...the BSA pointed out that countries with more relaxed Intellectual Property laws had higher child mortality rates. "The inference is clear", BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said, "Piracy kills babies".
The press release is in misleading language. Translated into english:
Countries should help us exploit our patents and trademarks to maintain monopoly. Our "unbiased" study confirms that this will help your economy.
I didn't know the boy scouts of america were cracking down on piracy! If they weren't always coming to my door with thier fundraisers, I'd have some money to buy some legal software!
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
So what's the easiest way to dramatically reduce piracy: use open-source software. So if everybody switches to open-source, it'll be good the the industry. So I suggest the BSA starts advocating OSS more. After all, that's good for the industry :)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Damn.....if thats a big issue with how piracy is wrong, I'm free and clear since I don't pay any sales tax anyway in the state I'm in (Delaware)......whew! my conscious is CLEARED!
Time to buy another spindle of CDRs!
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Another classic example of confusing correlation with causality. Just because there is a correlation between the two, doesn't mean that one *causes* the other. They could just as easily *both* be affected by a third variable (average income? average levels of education? percentage of computer-using businesses?)
This is the kind of thing that gives statistics a bad name.
Here's another correlation distortion. People in the mid 1800's had an average lifespan of what? 45 years? Today's average lifespan is like 70 or something. Now, choose your data sets that way, and compare life expectancy of those people who have personal computers, and those that didn't (those from the 1800's). You'll find a *strong* correlation between PC use and life expectancy.
But it's clearly meaningless. The key factor here is obviously availability of health care. You can use this same trick to "prove" relationship between almost anything.
This study is clearly junk.
...putting cause and effect the wrong way round. In other news:
* People sneezing more likely to catch cold.
* Companies with fewer security concerns more likely to use Linux.
* People who buy Ferrari's are more likely to be rich.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Tell the greedy politicians that they get something out of doing their job, which is supposed to be enforcing the law. $64B in taxes? That's a **great** way to ensure that jack-booted thugs with M-16s, AK-47s, MP5s or Styr-Augs (depending on the PD) bust down as many doors as possible to make sure that $64B is protected. That's of course assuming that eliminating piracy won't damage or destroy other sectors of the economy. People, $64B is ~$24B more than we spend on the insane WoD. I know that will get spread over many countries, but that's still a damn big incentive even if it's only an extra $5B to the general fund.
Imagine Palladium getting mandated to make this possible. No Macintosh anymore or similar platforms. Probably no WordPerfect either as it will cost Corel too much to get certified. Linux? Bye bye SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, et al. It will be an industry dominated by a handful of giants. Our spineless, ignorant politicians have long ago forgotten that it is small and medium-sized business, not the giants, that run most of the economy. If those go under, unemployment will skyrocket, both parties will have egg on their faces and knowing America these days, we won't have a third party gaining power, we'll have 2 party weasles giving people heaping buckets full of Socialism.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
FYI, the BSA, AKA "guys we don't like", are spreading FUD using $$$ and buying out the IDC, an industry analyst that government organizations such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the DOD, the DOJ, TIPS, the WTO, and perhaps even more will all listen to and as such we will be forced to respond by supporting groups such as the ACLU and the EFF in the fight to maintain our civil rights while also hoping that we're not drafted the SSS and also that the SSA holds together so we can all retire someday.
Or something.
If piracy is high, their IT sector must be low
If an IT sector is low it must be a developing country
If it's a developing country then piracy will be high
thus...
If piracy is high, we impose trade sanctions
If trade sanctions are imposed, a developing country's economy will suffer
If people can't make enough money to buy software because their economy suffers they will not pirate software because they have learned their lesson.
"Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That it was mandatory for all Journalists to take a minimum course in physics, statistics, biology, logic and history.
Causation and corelation are not the same thing.
Countries with a large IT industry tend to be highly developed, do not tend to have large organized crime, and tend to have stricter piracy laws. These all help keep piracy down.
This does not imply however that increasing piracy laws will increase the IT industry.
A=>B does not mean B=>A
It's like saying that countries with sea-access tend to have navy's, so if a country gets a navy it will have sea access.
It is a logical falicy.
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
Also, tithing 10% of your monies to our ministry (the Church of BSA) will return your monies tenfold. The Lord Bill has said so. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Once again somebody has decided to confuse cause and effect. Here's what the article says:
in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors, as measured as a share of the countries' gross domestic product(GDP)
My take:
in general, nations with higher rates of piracy spend less of their GDP on software.
Gosh, what a suprise. I never would have guessed. I wonder what they'll think of next. I supose they'll tell us that people who buy cars instead of stealing them have larger "automotive spending sectors". Which isn't to say that copyright violations are OK. But to tell a country that sending more of their GDP overseas to the US will help their local IT economy is just a bunch of crap IMHO.
"The organization estimates that 40 percent of all software programs worldwide are pirated"
Is this?
A: Of all the software installed 40% is Warez
B: 40% of titles have been turned into Warez
I think that they mean A but I only find B to be believable.
That countries with high piracy rates were much more likely to be populated by people of color.
"Without immediate action to stop the spread of piracy, American citizen's will soon find their skin turning darker and darker," said BSA Spokeman Bubba Nalk. "We can already see the effects of software piracy on college campuses, as file swapping continues to turn white students into asians and even black students, as evidenced by the increased enrollment of students of color."
Mr. Nalk had no comment on whether software piracy also caused male college athletes to turn into women.
paintball
Remind me again how much money you get for a pirated version of your software?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
These numbers make it clear that countries investing in Free Software will have a clear competitive advantage when it comes to their IT sectors.
Seriously. It is no secret that the great majority of Windows systems deployed all around the western (and the rest of the) world are pirate copies. There is no incentive for a specific company to switch to linux servers from windows servers when the linux solution will cost much more than the windows one.
The BSA was pleased to announce that after conducting a thurough audit of Michael Jackson's home and production company offices that all of his software had the approrpriate licenses, and in many cases, Mr. Jackson had several more licenses than were required for the software he was using.
"We're pleased to have Mr. Jackson's support in combating the numerous negative effects of software piracy," said BSA spokesman Bubba Nalk.
paintball
No, the point made by the BSA is that reduced piracy==profit. OSS is the best and easiest way to reduce piracy, hence it is good for the inductry. If you look at the OSS world, you'll also see that the countries that contribute the most to OSS are the ones with the biggest IT industry.
(BTW, I'm not saying that seriously, but just pushing the BSA statements a bit further)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I started my own business recently. Not two weeks after I submitted the paperwork for a state business license, I received a mailing from the BSA that encouraged me to volunteer for an audit "just to make sure I didn't expose myself to the liability of unlicensed or improperly licensed software."
Uh huh. Riiiiiight. Seems that the state gub'ment sold a mailing list to these jackbooted thugs. You gimme any of that juris-my-diction crap, you can cram it up your ass.
Piracy does very little to harm music, for the very simple reason that the people who make music (musicians) make money from PERFORMANCES, not selling recordings.
The only people piracy hurts is record companies, and I don't know about you, but I don't really care about the growth of record companies.
paintball
Worse yet is if the BSA presents it's findings over a complimentary lunch where they refuse to feed you until you've heard their propaganda, er, um, presentation.
If only I could print my proposals to use non-MS products in the latest issue of Dumbass Boss Monthly (this month's feature: Shiny Things As Business Strategy), I'd have no trouble. Graphs, documentation and logic seem to hold no weight.
Do not touch -Willie
Think about it: countries like Sudan and Nigeria... who's gonna be pirating Windows XP when they don't have a computer to run it on?
Of course they have computers in Nigeria. How else is John Bako sending out his 419 emails to everyone?
Homer: "There's not a single bear in sight--the 'Bear Patrol' is working like a charm".
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning."
Homer: "Thanks, honey."
Lisa: "According to your logic, this rock keeps tigers away".
Homer: "Hmmm. How does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't."
Homer: "How so?"
Lisa: "It's just a rock. But I don't see a tiger, anywhere."
Homer: "Lisa," *pulls out wallet* "I want to buy your rock."
----------
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
Alternatively - Countries with a large IT sector also have a strong IP lobby, which will often demand stronger laws.
>> in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates >> had the largest IT sectors
I think for people who don't think of software as work that puts bread on the table, software piracy feels less like stealing than it does for people who have had jobs writing software that paid their bills and bought food.
> This is the kind of thing that gives statistics a bad name.
I was discussing the value of using flaky numbers with a colleague the other day.
I made the point that people who use flaky numbers convincingly tend to get their way more often than people who fuss over accuracy.
So, whether you want to fuss over the quality of your numbers depends on your objective:
1) do you want to understand what is really happening, (eg. a scientist) , or
2) do you want to convince others to go along with you (eg. a politician).
Value judgements aside, what you ought to do depends on your objective.
The vast majority of software pirated by countries that the BSA cite as having small IT sectors is not domestically produced software. Thus, reducing piracy in these countries increases the revenue of coporations based in other countries (e.g. the US, and EU).
Software retail outlets and other industry "middlemen" in the countries in question will benefit from reduced piracy, but this is small potatoes compared to what BSA-affiliates stand to gain.
Thus, digital piracy in countries that are poor, or have small IT sectors, can be seen as sort of an international "trickle down" economic system. Such piracy provides software and entertainment to people who could not otherwise afford it, at the expense of corporations who, emperically speaking, can. Reducing piracy then becomes welfare "reform" for poor countries, more likely to hurt said countries' IT sectors than help them.
While end users are implied by the above paragraph, I would even include resellers of pirated software into this equation. As seedy as that business is, and as ignoble as the resellers' motives are, there's an undeniable Robin Hood component at work. Remember, these criminals reintroduce their ill-gotten wealth largely into their local economies.
Don't dismiss this as a romantic view of digital piracy; it's not. I mean only to provide much-needed devil's advocacy to the BSA's spurious horse hockey.
My other
The study seems to be employing a basic rhetorical falacy. They axtrapolate from their data beyond any level that is supportable by a reasonable person, in order to please their employer (in this case the BSA). Honestly, I can see how craskind down on software piracy can create jobs and expand the IT secor in effected countries. This would naturally occur if companies had to employ auditors for license tracking, maintain a vast number of concurrent-use license servers, and support insecure and broken but highly restrictive software products, each purchased from the one true OS vendor (gag) thereby generating a whole new tax base within that country.
Let us not forget that it was Steve Balmer who said software piracy was a key element of Microsoft's market penetration strategy (in 1994), where in developing countries, users would pirate Microsoft software - since they souldn't affort to license it anyway, then as their productivity rose through use of this high qwuality software, their revenues would grow and by the time the BSA got around to auditing them, they could afford to license the software they had previously pirated.
It's important to note that this has NOTHING to do with Intellectual Property Rights or Privacy but simply enforcement of contract law. IP rights - those that are defensable anyway - relate to issues such as term of copyright, the nature of fair use and the transition of protected works into the public domain. Nobody, as far as I know has ever questioned whether Microsoft owns the rights to it's products, or has exclusive rights to sell their own products (except in a few countries such as China).
As for Privacy, the only way software piracy in any way relates to privacy is in terms of the ability to conceal a crime. I can understand how reduced software piracy can improve an economy, especially if the countries studied had Gross National Products smaller than Microsoft's marketing budget, but the only way that a reduction in privaly could cause a reduction in software piracy is if Microsoft were allowed to prevent users from disabling such Windows features as the automatic license varification within Windows Media Player, or gather additional detailed system and software data as part of Windows Update (which it turns out Microsoft is already doing) or if companies were allowed to hack into the networks of suspected software pirates.
Nothing new here. We already knew that Microsoft wanted to prevent users from disabling the monitoring features that already exist in Windows Media Player and Windows XP, and we've already seen such organizations as the RIAA (in the case of the music industry) propose that they should be able to hack into computers owned by private citizens to confirm that they had not illegally optained copies of un-licenced IP. Overall, I think this was a horendously bad move on the part of the BSA (I still think the boyscouts should sue the business software alliance for use of the acronym, since it's clear that the latter has done serious and irreperable harm to the international perception of the acronym in any context), in that instead of making these findings public, they should have been used in support of a private lobying effort to ease privacy restrictions so Microsoft can look back at us through our computer screens and watch our every move.
-- George Orwell
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Personally, I quite like the principle behind IP laws. Copyright is a very useful system, allowing creators to profit from their works, and also adds teeth to the GPL. I do feel that friends sharing copies with each other is ultimately harmless though.
Speaking as a profesional software developer, I really don't care about small scale piracy. I probably wouldn't have got into programming without a pirated copy of Turbo C++. In fact, it was my vast library of pirated software that got me interested in computers in the first place. If other people do the same, I can't criticise. If the cost of that is lower sales, then that's fair. Typically people will actually buy the software if they think it's worth it, even if a pirated copy is available. I'll make some effort to convince people to buy rather than pirate, but if they don't, then that's my failing, not theirs.
The other aspect is that it is limited to groups of friends. Someone has to buy the original. File sharing networks are more of a problem here, but for the time being, it's too inconvenient to get anything from them. Most people live too far away for a decent connection, and the majority of people download only.
Now, selling pirated software is another matter entirely. Then they actually start competing with me directly, and affecting my company's bottom line. Large scale pirates can and will run off sevceral thousand CDs, and often the buyers will believe that they are genuine. Then it becoems unfair competition.
They have large IT sector - and huge piracy.
The whole study is a cheat since the
piracy depends mostly on the relation between
salaries and software cost.
When you make $15 an hour - it is OK for you
to pay $100 for soft. When $100 is your monthly
salary - there is no way you can afford $100
soft.
When are we going to see a study of economic losses resulting directly from the implementation of DRM? Congress loves to fund studies -- we need bills not just to require proper CD-labeling, but also officially-sponsored studies of the bad consequences of DRM. EPIC et al. need to start pushing for or funding a study or two like this. I may be atypical (or maybe not), but I have foregone spending literally thousands of dollars over the years because of DRM. I haven't upgraded my VCRs, because the newer ones recognize Macrovision. I haven't yet bought a DVD player. I've never bought a DVD in my life. I have bought a grand total of 3 used CDs over the past 20 years that CDs have been available. I haven't upgraded my computer software at home, just so I can avoid the DRM being built into newer software. Just the very thought of DRM disgusts me and dissuades me from embracing new technologies. I don't have the time to find DRM workarounds, so I just stick with my 20-year old analog equipment. Surely there must be thousands of people like me, at an enormous cost to the economy. ANTI-"PIRACY" hurts the economy, too.
So if I lived in some poor third world country, and happened to have just enough money to buy some legal, non-pirated, commercial software, imported from some big industrialized nation with a huge IT sector, then ... I couldn't spend that money on something else like feeding my children. Do these idiots at BSA think that when people don't spend money on something like software, that they end up just burning it as cooking fuel?
The reality is the cause and effect is the other way around. Piracy always exists, and it mostly exists among those who don't have much to lose if they get caught, or are sure they won't get caught, or just don't have the money to buy it in the first place. It's the existance of a strong IT sector that generates market for software, which in turn generates revenues for those who sell it (domestically or internationally).
The message BSA should be sending out is:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
There are a lot of posts refuting this study, although to me it seems perfectly logical. If people are pirating software, they are not paying for it. In places where people buy more software instead of pirating it, it is only logical that more money would be made off of the software -- you don't need a study to prove that.
In my humble opinion, the big issue is piracy in businesses. Businesses should be paying for their software, as they have the capital to do so. Some kid pirating Visual Studio to play with the development environments is not hurting the software industry -- they wouldn't buy it anyway if they couldn't pirate it, and they are actually helping by increasing dependancy on proprietary products. If the government starts cracking down on piracy due to studies like this, its going to be the fault of irresponsible business, not piracy in general.
Maybe "the countries that have the poorest record of IP rights" are the ones that can't afford to pay for the software and if they were stricter they would have no technology at all.
Coding Blog
This relates to the "piracy cost us $xxx,xxx,xxx zillion"-argument: it is not true. Most people pirating music/software would not have bought the product if couldn't pirate it.
I was also surprised that that www.bsa.org isn't running IIS, but Apache on FreeBSD.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.bsa.
The same applies to the music industry, book publishing, or any other intellecutal property enterprise. Keep that in mind next time you are firing up your P2P client and downloading the latest "free" software or music or whatever. Remember that your "free" software has a cost - rather than being measured in a few dollars out of your wallet, this cost is measured in people's jobs.
The music/movie industry would have us believe that free distribution = end of profit.
They would seem to disagree:
"Publishers and authors: listen up! We know you may be concerned about all this book-sharing talk, and what it might do to your sales. You may be surprised to know that we have many, many publishers and authors that are big BookCrossing fans. They've seen the paradoxical value in encouraging the sharing of books. In fact, if one were to compare the number of people who buy books based on seeing book reviews here as the books change hands, to the number of people who actually find free books, we can assure you there are far more buyers than finders. This site is not about saving people money. Many of our members, in fact, have started purchasing two copies of every book they pick out, so they can keep one and release the other into the wild! Here's a good forum discussion re: authors, book sales, and bookcrossing that should alleviate any concerns about lost sales."
He would seem to disagree as well.
More here.
True... none have anything to do with piracy, but it would appear that free does not necessitate loss.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
If you have a "job" in the piracy field, the software makers get no money, your revinue wont be taxed either so a government misses out also. Being a car thief could also be called a job, the person who loses the car gets insurance payout, thief gets/sells the car, insurance company raises premiums to pay for it. Everyone wins!
Laptop Reviews
In that case, shouldn't the US government be discouraging countries from passing tougher copyright laws?
Wouldn't that end up sending US jobs overseas?
This is a very flawed statistic. It reminds me of this study done by the tobacco companies once that said people who quit smoking are more likely to die earlier than people who don't quit. What they don't tell you is that people quit BECAUSE they're almost dead!!
Same goes for this study. There is a correlation between national wealth and anti-piracy. However this doesn't prove cause and effect. In fact there are many other factors that can easily play into this correlation. Nations that are rich are able to pay for software legitimately. Nations that are rich have the most to lose if copyrights are not enforced.
Think back to the last century. The U.S., being the young developing nation it was back then, didn't bother respecting any intellectual property rights themselves. Works from Britain were stolen, no royalties were paid, and our government didn't care much either. Just go do a search on google for what Charles Dickens thought about the U.S. when we stole his books/works and paid him nothing for it.
Fact is, developing nations NEED some latitude in terms of copyrights. Without it how are they going to develop? People in some of these countries can't even make enough $ in a year to pay for a crappy copy of Windows. The U.S. went through the same thing, and yet now we're calling the kettle black. This is hypocricy.
eTrade SUCKS
You gimme any of that juris-my-diction crap, you can cram it up your ass.
The mailing was for your protection.
The opinions stated herein do not necessarily represent those of anybody at all. Deal with it.