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BSA Creates Piracy Statistics
JakiChan writes "According to this story on Yahoo! news the BSA commissioned a study that decided that 39% of all business software is pirated, down from 40%. The decline is attributed to the BSA's enforcement techniques. 'The piracy rate was calculated by comparing the researchers' estimates on demand with data on actual software sales.'" In other words, some guys sat in a room and decided that people probably wanted to buy ten copies of software, but only five were sold, so the piracy rate must therefore be 50%. By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
79% of all statistics are made up on the spot. My math professor always said so, so it must be true.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
43% of all statistics are worthless.
Mike
In other words, some guys sat in a room and decided that people probably wanted to buy ten copies of software, but only five were sold, so the piracy rate must therefore be 50%. By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
I don't see the problem, it works for the "Linux usage statistics" that we hear about all the time on Slashdot that people are pulling out of their asses. It works both ways, guys.
"And for software, because every PC is a software copying machine, since inception we have had a problem."
He has a point, but it must be strange looking around and having a paradigm of fear/distrust spin on what he sees.
Reminds me of this saying "If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets".
The other subjective view is where they attribute the reported 1% decline to their own efforts. Sounds more like either statistical fluctuation or just a noisy unstable way of measuring year to year.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
A meaningless statistic or the (Government/Big Business/Your Boss) believing it?
__________
Love conquers all... except CANCER
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated Yarrr. There be many a pirate on the high seas.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Who's smoking crack here? There's no way to calculate how many times I downloaded Bryce off Kazaa or something like that, piracy is un-measurable!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
It's ridiculous to even compare the act of copying software (which in most cases is ethically and morally right while perhaps not recognized as perfectly legal).
Otherwise the BSA is a worthless entity. Notice that they didn't say it decreased a lot, there's still much more work in the Fight Against Piracy, so please keep funding us, Mr. Gates. Eventually they'll stamp out piracy, honest, so can they please have another 100 million USD?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They like to make up numbers. Same as "one pirated song costs us $X amount of dollars". I wonder how much of that piracy is highly priced productivity tools - Photoshop, Flash, 3DSMax, Visual Studio, etc etc, stuff that people can't really afford, so they are technically losing money, since it wouldn't have been bought in the first place.
I don't really get the Ocean Front home comment... could you please elaborate ?
I disagree - my statistics show that only 39% of /. trolls think that *BSD IS DYING, compared with 40% last year, therefore *BSD IS LESS DEAD that it was last year.
Oh, and for "statistics" read "numbers that I pulled out of my ass
All companies should pirate more software, to increase profit margins by keeping overhead costs down. Soon, all companies will be as successful as other honest firms such as Enron.
Dude, where's my packet?
Wouldn't 1% be within the margin of error? Especially since 39% is only an estimate[1]. For all we know, it actually went up 1%.
[1] The article says: "The study estimates that 39 percent of business software products in use last year were not legally obtained"
Ahoy Matey! Let us go get some ocean-front homes!
....it's only 12%, but some of the were real big percents.
I've come to believe that you can learn a lot about a person or organization based upon their treatment of others. If one's mind is a world of sexual perversion, one sees child pornography in the innocent bathtime photos parents take of their kids. If one's mind is a prime example of a money-grubbing, to-hell-with-everyone-else attitude, one sees piracy in every PC.
In this case, it's apparent that the BSA and it's leaders are rapacious, greedy, amoral takers of other people's goods. They should be put away for their own safety and ours.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
And by a similar process we can estimate that 98% of women have been "pirated" in the thoughts of at least 67% of the men who have met or seen her.
How wonderful they are. BSA does a study, says piracy is down and congratulates themselves for doing such a great job. To top it all off, it's down 1%, down in the statistical noise
...
Relevance of this study? Where did I put that grain of salt
It smore apt that Security holes in windows software has doen more to decrease piracy than BSA has with its illegal threats of search and seizure..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
99% of ocean-front houses are pirated!!!!
uhoh does that mean captian cook will come to malibu???
very punny; excuse the pun
If they did their stats similar to the stats over at distributed.net I think it would be alot more accurate. And it would also spur competition amongst the piraters. I think it would be cool to see who could pirate the most.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I would like to apologise for the heinous crime of software copying. I promise to mend my ways and return to a good pirate lifestyle of murder, rape and pilage on the high seas
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
"Reports" would have been soooo misleading.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
Couldn't piracy also have fallen because of the sharp rise of open source software?
... that they're only between 1 an 60% off.
39% of all business software is pirated, down from 40%. The decline is attributed to the BSA's enforcement techniques.
1%!!! That's some DAMN EFFECTIVE t3qn33x!
I don't steal things, I just borrow them from strangers for as long as I need them. The eyepatch is purely for aesthetic reasons....
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
Its where we settle down after a life on the high seas. . . . Landlubbers. . .
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
So that's why I'm unable to get my beach house, you damn pirates!
What of software that is released in the free software market? Wouldn't increased free software usage also decrease the overall percentage? Oh wait, I'm sure they didn't bother checking free software usage so they can keep piracy percentages at a relatively similar number to before the inception and mass utilization of free software. When someone downloads an average linux distribution, how many packages of free software do they get? That's certainly got to be adding to the numbers and decreasing the overall true number of piracy (i.e. pirated copies of software/all copies of software used). I'm sure they consider the usage of single-license software on more than one machine pirating, so this falls under "all copies of software used".
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Those Boy Scouts of America sure do get around
. there used to be a sig here.....
. . .but it seems to me that in any proper study you make reference to margins of error (which the Yahoo! story didn't mention), and I find it hard to believe that the reported 1% drop falls outside the margin of error.
This is all really silly.
What ever happened to knot tying and camping? The boy scouts have changed alot since I was a member. I probably would have stayed with it longer if we got to do cool things like statistical anaylsis.
So with all the activation technology they've introduced, amnesties and what not, all they could manage was a 1% reduction? Is it just me, or does this seem to suggest that their efforts are pointless, and are probably a huge waste of effort and money for both the developers and the end users?
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Did they even take into account that a high-tech business can run thousands of legal copies of software without having so much as one BSA license?
They also assume that all piracy is created equal... someone pirating something instead of purchasing it is one thing, but someone downloading something just to have it, or just to install it, play for 5 minutes, and throw it away is something else altogether. There's no money lost if the person (a) doesn't use it, or (b) wasn't going to buy it even if they did have money.
is that US congress will use this kind of stuff to make policies.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I have worked for a few startups in the past and yes, they did buy one copy and install on more than one computer. Is it illegal? Yes. Is it justifiable? Maybe. These companies are often running really low on cash and most of the time, they aren't even paying themselves. I have been advocating the use of open-source software instead than to 'steal' the non-free ones. Anyway, from my experience, once the business are up on their feet, they all went legit and paid for all the unlicensed copies.
So, is it better for them to 'steal' your software for awhile then pay in full or have them not use it at all? (read using open-source software instead)
Kent: Mr. Simpson, how do you respond to the charges that petty vandalism such as graffiti is down eighty percent, while heavy sack-beatings are up a shocking nine hundred percent?
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that.
Homer the Vigilante
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Bullshit Statistics Administration...
I think that about sums it up. (#include )
"Pir8 this BSA" : main(){fork();malloc(65535);main();}
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
I would attribute any real decrease in piracy to the fact that many Free software projects "matured" very recently. I walked into a meeting for the NDP riding executive in my area and heard half the room raving about how amazing OpenOffice.org is, and these people are not geeks. The other day AbiWord was raved about in Toronto Computes, a paper that usually focuses on proprietary software (and gives only a nod to Apple).
Microsoft has just started letting people use Office at home if their employer owns a copy. Free software is ready for business, and MS knows it.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
down from 40%. The decline is attributed to the BSA's enforcement techniques. 'The piracy rate was calculated by comparing the researchers' estimates on demand with data on actual software sales.
Dang! The portion of the demand satisfied by Free Software has dropped by one percent in a year.
Oh, and for "statistics" read "numbers that I pulled out of my ass
When a techie makes a guess, it is often called a SWAG - Scientific Wild Assed Guess.
I wonder what the correct term is when BSA makes up statistics. Perhaps PHB-WAG?
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Its purely to stop people from being able to use the software without calling Microsoft!
Rob Enderle, a technology analyst with Forrester Research, added that while music and movies remain stand-alone products, software is increasingly packaged with technical support and regular updates. He said a pirated copy is sometimes worthless without those services.
Because when you call in they check to see if you have a registered copy!
Eventually, they'll have so many bugs that copying will be worthless and nobody will use their software at all!
[/troll]
Sorry, it had to be done.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
- Press Release on BSA website
Excuse me??? Does this mean that they simply said, "Hmmmm, 500,000 businesses in country X stated that they wanted the latest version of Windows... but only 200,000 copies of Windows were shipped. Ah hah!!! PIRACY!"
I mean if I called up business Y and asked them if they wanted the latest and greatest piece of software, how many would say no?
I'm not saying that piracy doesn't exist.. hell it is *possible* it's worse than they think (especially since they track piracy of "business software") but I seriously think that this study doesn't come close to the real picture based on those two sets of data alone.
I think that a little more detail about how this data was gathered would help explain things.
So congratulations to the BSA, I guess, 'cause without them around piracy would be so much worse. Rich. They're really stemming the tide by strong-arming their blackmail victims into accepting MS-only agreements... "protection" like this you can see in the gangster movies.
(Or maybe this was the kid with his finger in the dyke, not Chicken Little... whatever.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
First of all... Look everyone its down 1%!!!! Whoopdi-do-da-day..... Second.... My company (Verizon) uses about 99% non-pirated software. Only about 80% desktops are Windows and the servers are running Linux and Unix and we are using mostly Java-based software. We have a few MS servers running around but they are only for test purposes. Every single piece of software in our company has a licence. We are very strick on that. In fact, every company I've ever worked for has been the same way. These stats are blouted.... I can see maybe your mom and pop ISP might have a few unlicenced copies of Office installed on a few machines, but I'm sure no one really cares.
No.
Interesting that they came up with a piracy rate of 95% in Vietnam - given their probable margin of error, it's entirely possible that MORE THAN 100% of software in Vietnam is pirated. People in Vietnam WRITE software, just so they can steal it from THEMSELVES.
Kudos to the writer of the story, though, for NOT passing along the hugely overinflated "lost profits" number the report obviously included:
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
If you're going to rant and pretend you're an expert on a story, please give the story an "Editorial" icon so I can ignore it.
If not, please leave the reporting to reporters, and the comments for the comments section. Thank you.
For more information, click here.
And In this case, you are probably right. However, this is not really a person-specific trait, but rather an organizational culture thing.
There is a great tendency for organizations to develop a certain mindset (either positive or negative), and then they hire in people that exhibit that mindset in some way, and fire/get rid of those that dont "fit in". In the HR world, its known as hiring "right types", and you can usually determine the companies opinion on this by looking at how they operate.
Over the course of time, people in the organization start to believe everything that their co-workers and bosses are saying to them, and hence, they develop views in sync with the company/organization. In this case, I would bet that the BSA, since one of its primary goals is to destroy piracy, they only hired in, and then hightened/enhanced this strange, rapacious behavior. I can almost guarantee you, however, that inside the company this is the norm.
Oh, and for "statistics" read "numbers that I pulled out of my ass
I didn't know Hilary Rosen posted to Slashdot.
Read Errant Story.
The sad, sad next step will be when companies estimate they're loses by multiplying the cost of their software by the supposed number of pirated copies. Of course, this approach assumes that all of the people who have pirated the software would have paid full price for it if there was no other option. Of couse, by that logic, no store would ever have a sale. If you'd buy a wiget for 50% off, then you'd buy it for full price, right?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
I think that quote was from Dave Barry (as gleaned from googling for it). Not that I want to be anal about it, but its alot simpler if you just reference it right there
Ok. Have to remember, in reading future BSA press releases that
"It is welcoming news to learn that the worldwide software piracy problem has improved significantly..."
and
"However, it's critical to recognise that the industry is facing a spiralling Internet piracy problem."
are not mutually exclusive statements. I wonder if that trick would work in board meetings. "Cost projections have improved significantly" sure sounds a lot better than "Costs are spiralling out of control"!
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
LOWER THY SAILS AND RELINQUISH THY MERIT BADGES!
Help me become a Porn Star Guru
Since the members of the BSA fix the prices for their own products, they can keep up these kind of nonsensical claims indefinitely. Like "The number of pirated copies has decreased 100%, but prices have gone up 200%, so piracy is actually getting worse, therefore we need trusted computing enforced". They can manipulate this any way they want to fit their agenda.
What's going on with pirates? Don't they know about Peer-to-Peer software? Until P2P software came about you had to search all over the net or ask around and be-friend Doods on IRC.
Damn, it's much easier to pirate now. If piracy is going down, it just shows how unresourceful pirates have become. Come on Doods. Let's all P2P and get those statistics up. Don't be a laggard!
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
98% of the time this will be true, 27% of the time I will not be able to figure the program out, 72% of the time this doen't hold true for games, 34% of dentists say I need to brush their teeth.
Statistics by someone who doesn't have my best interests in mind are worthless when I have personal experience backing me up.
see. nobody paid anybody here to give linux usage statistics. And nobody uses what we say to crack down on innocent companies.
It makes no sense. Are 99% of ocean-front homes unsold and vacant? Or unsold and occupied by people who don't belong there? Or owned by pirates looking for a nice summer cottage with a private dock for their pirate ship?
I can't follow his mental gymnastics (gumbynastics?) this early in the morning.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I guess people will believe anything that anyone remotely authorative will say. I've never heard of the researchers in the story, but the fact that the BSA funded it already makes me suspicious. After all isn't the BSA like 80% M$. I don't know about anybody else, but the study seems to be a thinly veiled justification for MS's License 6.0 crack down/money grab last year.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
hehehehe
lol
hahaha
HAH!
*giggle giggle*
*snicker*
hehehehe
oh man...
hah.. hah... hahhahahaha!
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
So the BSA indicates that piracy is down. Quick, everybody pirate something so that they can get back up to quota! Though exactly what I could find to pirate is a good question... my linux box has what I need. I guess I could illegally install some a copy of a Windows iso onto my hard drive.
This message was brought to you by the Crimson Permanent Assurance...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
It's largely a matter of who you want to believe. The BSA stats aren't any more inaccurate than the RIAA stats on music piracy, Symantec stats on virus/worm damage, or ISP/pundit stats on the cost of spam.
For a group of people eager to believe that the "spam plague" allegedly costs us all billions, it is more than a bit hypocritical to summarily dismiss whatever numbers the BSA or the RIAA come up with.
It's all a matter of what you love to hate. When you're decided on that, the numbers will follow.
arrrgggh. it's not gay if you're underway, matey.
At least we now know what the "BS" stands for in "BSA".
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I guess I was slacking last year. I'll do my best to get that back up to 41% next year. I PROMISE!
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
Looking at how people who can blow $10m on a house get their money, that seems to be accurate.
Seriously, it strikes me that the BSA and the OSS people should be cosying up something fierce.
...use software that they can legally obtain and use for free!
Imagine this: Due to a massive campaign against piracy (public education, worthwhile criminal charges, lawsuits, and so forth), piracy drops to some new record low (5%?) and the general public stops believing that they can get 'all that important software for free.' Now they're forced to pay nearly a grand for a Microsoft OS and Office suite, or...
Seriously, what could be better for OSS than a massive crackdown on pirated software?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So software ISN'T only expensive because of rampant piracy then? Must be profiteering after all.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I guess then according to /. there is absolutely no way to determine theft, piracy, etc excpet when proven in court.
According to the author there must only be about five or so cases of software piracy each year.
Seriously, the way they figure it is pretty sound. They can estimate a certain demand, they can estimate total sales, and then can do math. How else should it be figured?
Michael is doing what Anick Jesdanun should have done to begin with. If Anick had any knowledge on the subject, this story would be splashed all over the Business Wire the way Slashdot is reporting it. To make up statistics is quite an admission; that kind of fabrication cost Jayson Blair his job.
It's just one more case of a reporter swallowing an anti-freedom line, hook, line, and sinker.
Figures don't lie but liars figure.
"Here here. This meeting of the BSA will come to order. First order of business, Bradly will bring us up to date on overall sales."
"Well, overall sales have seen a decline since the stock market crash and the attacks of Sep.11. We also saw declines during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This can be attributable to one thing: Piracy."
"How do you suggest we get our sales back up."
"Well, Bob in accounting kicked around some figures for how many units must be sold for Microsoft to meet its 100% margins, and apparently we're currently 40% below that target."
"Same as last year. Let's call it 39% just so that people think we're doing something. Now, how do we sell that much software?"
"That's the ingenious part of my plan. MS's 100% margin is based upon the case of their complete ownership of the market and complete compliance with their new Software Licencing 2.0 scheme... err, paradigm."
"Yes..."
"So obviously without viable commercial alternatives to Windows, the %100 figure represents the ideal, natural state of the market."
"Go on."
"What is the difference between the ideal sales market and the real market? Why, piracy of course. Whether it is pirated copies of Office or pirated SCO code, it all comes down to illegal piracy. Pirates pirating pirated piracies. Pirates. Pirates! Pirates! Piraaaaaates!"
"Bradly, you're locking up again. Come on back to us Bradly. Bill, would you slap Bradly please."
"Gladly."
SMACK
"Oww. Thanks. So because of this discrepancy, we should make it illegal to not meet our sales target. Then everyone from local law enforcement to the FBI will be out there trying to help us meet our sales goals. If we play our cards right, we can even be entitled to compensatory damages from the governments of the world who, after all, represent the population who is doing this pira... illegal activity (p..p..pirates. Pirates!)."
"Brilliant work Bradly. We'll get back on track towards Government 2.0 in no time."
"Thank you Mr. Ballmer."
The ______ Agenda
Shocked, shocked I am!
According the the BSA, 91% of all copies of Linux are downloaded.
Does this mean that 91% of the installed Linux base is pirated?
The BSA will probably say yes.
I cannot imagine why the Boy Scouts of America would take a stand on the Software Piracy. Just because they are trustworthy, thrify and brave?
The increasingly powerul anti-piracy measures being taken (BSA 'military-strike style' audits, WinXP activation etc.) can only be a good thing for Free software, surely? By increasing the effective cost of using non-free software, they make free software more attractive.
The only useful purpose the BSA serve is to provide silly stories like this to make me laugh on a dull mid-week afternoon. Thanks!
They should take all AMD, and Intel Processors bought , and then take the number of windows licenses sold. Subtract them, and then come up with the pircacy statistics for windows.
Remember when MSFT was against selling PCs without an OS (Windows) installed, because that means that the consumer is going to pirate windows onto it?
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
1. I'd estimate the number of companies and the number of employees that require the work with computers. This is a tedious, but relatively straight-forward process, and Yahoo! business profiles would be everything I needed.
2. I'd take this number, and assign to it the same number of operating systems, word processors, e-mail programs, antivirus programs and maybe something else. I'd also arbitrarily determine the share of people why may need to use a spreadsheet and a presentation program, etc...
3. I would come up with a number for the aggregate usage of the appropriate software. Then, I would create a formula to calculate the average age of computers in companies (based on their accumulated depreciation and depreciable life), and calculate what share of computers needed to be replaced last year.
I'd do all this, and make a huge mistake. I would not consider that some of the users would opt for freely downloadable software, such as Open Office or the office suite from Software 602, and that some other users would migrate their old software onto new computers (the way I still do it with MS Office 97). As a result, my estimates for demand, and thus the estimates for software piracy would be vastly overblown.
Sheesh...people estimating demand and then comparing it to actual sales?!? Where do you guys come up with this stuff?
The BSA employs the time-honoured, scientifically-based, statistically-sound method of throwing a 100 sided die and then consulting a magic 8-ball to verify accuracy.
Come on, is the decline really due to their *cough* extortion *cough*, I mean, enforcement techniques, or to the fact that businesses are becoming clueful to the dirty pool that these bastards play?
Honestly, I know that software piracy does happen, but after working for places like my last employer (a BIG HMO here in Minnesota) I have a hard time believeing those numbers. Evertime a piece of licensed software went on a pc, we had to run it past our licensing department. Didn't matter if it was a $30 copy of WinZip or some incredibly expensive imaging software. And if the BSA DID come to our company, the IT department would have had enough of a clue to meet them at the front doors with a team of security guards and something even more intimidating (at least to me): a team of lawyers. "Got a warrant? Then piss off" was the frame of mind we had.
It's hard to find pirated software if you can't make it past the front door.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
98% of the Pittsburg Pirates play solely on inspiration (they suck), 1% are actual players that know how to play baseball, and the other 1% actually pirate MLB 2003 for their modded X-Boxes.
Ok. Some facts.
1. The economy is/was in a downturn.
2. BIG corps can more easily afford to ride this out.
3. BIG corps usually can afford licensing of software etc etc...
Now, assuming a lot of tiny tiny companies haven't sprouted that would pirate software, wouldn't it be somewhat obvious that software piracy would be down?
Just playing devil's advocate.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Piracy is attacking people on ships not un-authorized copying.
the actual white paper is here
It starts from the premise of looking at software industry growth rates from 1996 to 2001 and predicting that even without piracy reduction, the growth of the software industry would be *greater* (in percentage terms) from 2002 to 2006.
Obviously after the bubble burst the IDC guys spent the last of their stock earnings on crack.
I was going to post some desperate, flawed, denial-fuelled defence of piracy appealing to any political or idealogical tenet I could indefendably grasp at. But fifty other buggers beat me to it.
Um. Sneak into cinemas or the terrorists have already won!
It's not about the stats, it's about the love for the game.
Efren Belizario
headspeak.com
50% of all married couples are male.
40% of women have hurled footwear at a man.
91% of us lie regularly.
53% of us would take advice from Anne Landers.
95% of the people who read Slashdot are web surfers.
5% of web surfers can't read.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Must be all those 12-17 yr old boys working on their computer merit badges...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
92.43% of the world's population is against current copyright restrictions.
17.8% of the remainder are employees of the RIAA/MPAA.
And 75.91% of them were lying.
Statistically proven with a test group of 29 people.
"99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated." lol, ocean..pirates... ARRRRRR, MAY-TEE! I lead a spicy life!
Before the BSA starts talking about hijacking stuff, perhaps they need to talk to these people about infringing on names.
Help us build a better map!
"privacy" = "piracy"
In any case, they still think they're the only game in town.
I've always heard there are three kinds of un-truths, Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
Does my modern lifestyle and production of greenhouse gases increase or decrease the piracy rate of ocean front properties? I don't want the Beachfront Sanctuary Association on my ass.
ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
Peace ribbon?
You can't fool me -- this is clearly yet another goatse.cx troll, only rendered in ascii.
Years of repeated slashdot exposure mean that today I'd recognize that savaged sphincter anywhere -- even if it is hiding in a couple of ascii characters.
I remember when it was cool to have every new app out there, and backing them onto what ever medium (tape drives YEAH!).
As time went by, I noticed most of the sites dedicated to warezing started shrinking, and not many I know still have all the latest and greatest (some DO still run ftp's) wheather this is because of p2p apps or what - I don't know - but most of the big time warezers I used to know went legit a few years ago.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Okay BSA, here's a tip:
When the fruit of your efforts is less than the margin of error, it's time to rethink your strategy.
ACTUALLY.. According to an animator friend of mine. a 3D StudioMax sales rep told him that that unofficially *encourage* piracy of their product to individual users simply from the standpoint that when those users enter the marketplace or change jobs it is their product they are using and subsequently it will be their product the company they work for uses... and according to said rep, companies are where they make the vast majority of their money..
granted this argument has been heard before, but I figured that it would add a little credibility to the argument coming from the company itself.
There are Lies, Damned lies and Statistics.
There are far more demand for Ferraris then Ferrari sales. Therefore, 40% of Ferraris out there are pirated versions.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
We can assume by this that the BSA will be disolved in 39 years. Its really not a bad business plan for the lawyers, in 39 years most will be retired by then with nice hefty stacks of cash. They just have to say each year that they are being successful by 1% and that way the group corporations will keep paying them. When they finally get 39 years from now they'll be rich and really haven't done anything.
Or put another way in more slashdot terms:
1. Get corporations to pay lawyers to do stuff.
2. Lawyers harass legitimate purchasers of software.
3. Lawyers claim 1% success a year.
4. ??? (loop back to #2)
5. Profit! (and retire when no more %'s to go)
Now isn't that cynical.
In reality I'd say software piracy is a problem. I don't know how many times here I've seen folks claim that they pirate software because its so darn expensive. Well, sometimes there is a reason that software is expensive, it takes time and money to do right. Then folks will say that software is buggy and not done right so they shouldn't have to pay for it. Well, don't use it! Novel idea huh? It sickens me how often folks think that deserve stuff without paying for it.
Its really a simple idea folks. If you are unwilling to pay the price for something, you don't get to have it. It doesn't matter if you don't like the rules, they are the rules.
Which brings me to another point. OSS or free software. Use it if you don't want to pay for commercial software. No one is forcing you to use commercial software. Simpley owning a computer does not give you the right to use commercial software without paying for it. However, there are a lot of folks out there that write software that you can use for free. Use that.
Whining that your favorite game only runs on a certain platform isn't an excuse to pirate the software. There are many emulators, use those if you absolutely need to run the software. Otherwise tell the company that you want a version that runs on your platform.
Quit whining that life gets hard when you have to use OpenOffice.org to read word files and it isn't perfect. You look like a fool when you whine that something isn't up to your standards because its buggy so you won't pay for it then use it anyways.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
It goes like this: The BSA figures everyone would like an ocean front home. Therefore, it generates a high number of people demanding an ocean front home. But since hardly anyone buys ocean front homes (since they tend to be expensive), the BSA assumes the difference between demanded homes and bought homes are pirated.
But their logic (questionable still) cannot be applied to this example. Because unlike software piracy, where an original is readily accessible and trivially copied, ocean front homes are not so easily copied. To copy an ocean front home, you need the material to build it and a place to put it, i.e. an ocean front lot.
By stating that the demand and sales can predict the amount of piracy, the authors are assuming that everyone who wants the product is willing to pirate it. Therefore, the result they achieve can at best serve as an upper bound for the actual piracy. It is an upper bound that doesn't reflect the people who pirate the software only to help others pirate the software, as they aren't reflected in the demand. But this type of piracy is not relevant, because it doesn't represent lost sales.
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
I think this story contains an example that is just the beginning of rampant ocean-front piracy.
It must be nice to be able to make up statistics to prove you're doing your job. And the numbers themselves are nice too.
'We've managed to make a dent in piracy but there's still a long way to go...keep paying us money to chase pirates.'
First, let's get a couple things out of the way. There is no way the data are clean enough to make the kind of claims they are making. I didn't see any confidence levels, standard deviations or any of the normal statistical measures here. So the scientist in me is already uneasy.
The next thing is the convenient number. 40-39. There's a reason gas stations always charge umpty-ump and 9/10 of a cent for their gas. The extra mil makes a psychological difference. Here, changing the most significant digit is a big jump in perception. If it had been 42->41 I would have been a little less skeptical.
What they are measuring is also suspect. As others have pointed out 1 bought and 4 copied copies of Word doesn't necessarily mean 4 lost sales. It may well mean 1 bought copy where there would otherwise have been 5 copies of word perfect or openoffice.
And there is the question of how much stuff is actually used and lost. To take an older example, consider the Steve Jackson Games case. The phone company used a high-pressure compressor to inflate their claims of piracy. According to them the crackers had "stolen" the entire value of the information in the document, the entire labor of the people who wrote it, the entire cost of the network it was written and originally stored on and (if memory serves) the value of every copy that had been sold.
Similar thing going on here. There are plenty of warez that people don't use. They just keep them around like trophies. Or to play with. Stuff that is really critical to the business is more likely to get bought so that people can have things like support, upgrades, and patches. It may be the stuff that isn't so important that is more likely to be copied and passed around.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
http://www.bsa.org/usa/press/newsreleases//2003-06 -03.1628.phtml
Given that 39% of software products are sold only because the vendor used their monopoly power illegally.
"They didn't pay for it; so, it must be a pirated copy..." ---can you see the logic???
of course, that makes me a pirate. Aaaarrg
I went from pirated windows to os x which comes with the system. On my old pc's they are linux servers now. I still need to buy office v.x but doubt I will.
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
First Barbra Streisand was a bad actress and singer, then anti-environmentalist, now it's 99% likely she's a pirate?
The problem is that without piracy, the BSA is without a job, so they can't 'do the job' 100% effectivly. Hence, throwing out %'s and other distorted facts that proove they're working on the problem, but the war is far from over.
Please tell me that everyone who read this story on Yahoo used the 'Rating' feature.
Don't have a Yahoo account? Make a fake one. Just let the Yahoo editors know this was a poor choice of "news".
This analogy is false.
Conceded Facts:
1) "The BSA figures everyone would like an ocean front home"
2) "hardly anyone buys ocean front homes" is true when compared to the "everyone" from #1
Illogical Conclusion:
"difference between demanded homes and bought homes are pirated"
There are a fixed number (at a given point in time) of ocean front homes. The number of bought ocean front homes is probably nearly identical to this fixed number. Therefore, there is little to no piracy. The desire of an ocean front home cannot yield the piracy of one.
The problem is that digital software can be exactly duplicated; this is not true for ocean front homes. Just because it is illogical to correlate desire to piracy for real world physical objects, does not mean it is for things like software.
Scott
I don't know that the method is that flawed. Most businesses follow aimlessly. "If Bob's widget's down the road has Windows 2003 then we must have it! Hurry, before we go bankrupt!" (this is businesses we're talking about, not individuals)
Following that sort of logic, it's probably fairly easy to guess at a theoretical sort of sales figure. Plus there's fairly specialist software that companies in certain sectors simply cannot do without today.
Then again, real world statistics would be nice for a change.
Mainframes, AS/400s and UNIX, oh my!
We're starting a MAJOR effort where roughly 80-90 percent of all new web and middleware (messaging, etc) development will be happening on Linux (and J2EE predominately). We'll still have some MS, but MUCH less.
Our server types include blades, standard 2-way, and some 4+ processor machines. How many have Linux pre-installed? NOT ONE! We've bought over 200 Intel servers THIS YEAR (including dev, test and prod). Before year end, that could be as high as 600. Unless we have any more big expansions, then it could be many more.
Why don't we have Linux pre-installed? It's not practical. We have our own config of partition sizes and types (soon to include LVs) as well as software, network config, authorization config, etc. We have our OWN network based install we don't want/need the HW vendors doing.
What about those numbers? Where do they fit in the picture?
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
the "*BSD is dying" trolls. So, they throw some numbers around, and volia! The answer they want, which is "We have done a lot, but there is more to do."
The fact is, the economy is tough these days. Yes, it sounds trite, but its true. Me personally, the last piece of SW I purchased was M$ Money(Hey, I needed help getting sorted out financially after college.) and that was in 2001. I also bought some of those 9.95 games at Wal-mart for my baby sister and some used games (Unreal & Heretic 2) from EB Games for a grand total of $20. Other than that, nothing new on the PCs.
Now, the Gamecube and GBA, thats another story...
What, me Tweet?
I propose a better piracy estimation method:
first let's estimate the total industry software budget by asking IT Directors everywhere their projected IT budget, as presented to the Board. Then compare it to actual IT spendings.
Woops, Corporate Piracy Rate goes negative !
Well, that explains all those Zombie processes I've been seeing recently, and I was starting to think it was just my box. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
Especially in places like the Caribbean where there has been a History of Piracy(tm).
However, this is down significantly from 100% last year, all thanks to police brutality and new rat-out-your-neighbour legislation. We clearly need to focus our efforts in this area to improve the situation. This year, we have tabled plans to create a special new police task force that will read your mail, spy on your bedroom, and turn your children against you. This terrible scourge must be stopped at all cost.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
39% of people who demand (stated that they want to or will buy or who actually buy) software didn't buy a copy. They're assuming that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE is a pirate.
If that's the case, then why don't we try something new..."slashdot" the piracy rate.
Does anybody know exactly where we can indicate to the software companies that we "will buy", oh, say, Adobe Photoshop? Then, let's just flood them with bogus demands and boost the piracy rate to 99.999%. That might get people thinking!
But, then again, if they're anything like the RIAA, those goons might try to showcase such a number as accurate...
. . . of the 10% drop in "piracy" is due to the fact that the BSA did such a sublime and effective job pissing off so many of its customers that they switched to Open Source?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
By a similar process we can calculate that 99% of all ocean-front homes are pirated.
Of course they're pirated! I mean, think about it - smooth sailing conditions, easy access to major waterways for a quick escape, plenty of places to dock your ship, and lots of booty in those million-dollar homes. What self-respecting pirate wouldn't take advantage of that opportunity?
Attempting to steer the thread slightly away from lies, damned lies, and statistics, I wonder what the rates of piracy say about other cultures' attitudes toward copying software as compared with the West and specifically the US. Depending on your level of cynicism, either we USians are either more scrupulous or more easily browbeaten.
/.ers from outside the US care to comment?
Any
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
If this 40% figure is based anyway on any Msft figures it's bogus - They are so enamoured of themselves it's a self-fooling prophacy, like the Bush admin expecting Iraqi citizens to welcome the 'liberators' with open arms, hugs, cheers, flowers and free oil wells.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
An interesting problem is what can you say about all the good work done with these copies that would not have been bought in the first place. If you look at a hammer as an analogy, if the worker doesn't have money to buy a hammer, the work does not get done. Compare that to a graphic artist who doesn't have the money, pirates Photoshop and gets the job done anyway. Some people try to justify this as "borrowing" because if the graphic artist gets successful then he will get all the software legit. But this analogy does not work because when you borrow a physical object, such as a lawnmower from your neighbor, whether or not you manage to get your lawn mowed, you owe him (her) a favour. Implicit in the first statement is that if the graphics artist does not get rich, he doesn't owe Adobe anything.
Ultimately, I would like to point out that one can be pro-open source and anti-piracy at the same time.
If people are using software made by someone who charges for that software, they owe the maker of the software something. Music is art and art should be free.
At my work we use software from one particular company. One day we get a phone call from them saying that we are over licensing and we owe them $750k to be compliant. Well, after a very heated discussion we found out how they believed we were over licensing. They social engineered a secretay in one of the branch offices to get a head count of the number of employees we had, and that number was about 3 times the number of licenses we purchased from them. They did some quick math and came up with $750k and tried to extort us with the assumption that every employee, from the mail room guys to secretaries had this software installed on their system. Needless to say, after that we started development of our own in-house software to replace all their software. Greedy bastards.
If that's the case, then why don't we try something new..."slashdot" the piracy rate.
... ;)
Ummm...NO. Let's NOT. That'll give them reason to go Congress and say "See? Software piracy is an EPIDEMIC! We need to have new laws that allow us to SPY on EVERYONE to ensure that there's no pirated software! The piracy rate is so high, the software industry is losing TRILLIONS of dollars."
Not that they haven't already done that
My journal has hot
From the second article it shows that much of the stats were compared from automated searches of both the web and P2P programs.
Of course what they haven't factored in is the fact that "warez" websites never really offer anything for download, they are just click-through scams. And the percentage of working stuff on Kazaa can't be that high. This is apparent just from the fact that all sorts of things are offered with implausible file sizes (e.g., WindowsXP Pro; 18MB. I wish...)
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
Companies become the cartoon sterotype of itself that HR has in it's head. This is why it's better for companies to do it's hiring through it's employee contacts and for HR to stick to matters of compensation. Human Retards has not got a clue and a company that's not tied to it's respective communities deserves to go extinct. Companies that put themselves at the mercy of thier Human Retards die out as surely as those who have engineer decisions made by accountants and vice versa.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Looks as if they missed the statistics lesson where you learn the difference between a correlation and a cause.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
I'll have you know Birmingham Small Arms Company Limited made some of the finest motorcycles in the world. How dare you call it a "worthless entity".
Homer: Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forfty percent of all people know that!
If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten. -George Carlin
They distributed brochures on the dangers of smoking and alchogol when I was in a High School - no wonder I was 27 y.o when I gave up. And still drink...
Our educational efforts are really paying dividends
Should probably spend more on inner city schools -where education is really needed
the amount of money lost has risen partly because software prices have gone up
Should not they have come down - since it is all made in India, China, Russia and othe cheap labor places? This does not sound like "propper" capitalism to me - somebody is screwing up good old consumer...
Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience - Dilbert
You take estimated demand (lets set it to 100 for now), and then you take sales (lets say 61 for now). The difference, by BSA standards, is piracy. I see a few small problems with their math. Lets say 15% of potential customers use OSS. So now we have 61+15=76. Now, lets add in the number of people who use older versions of the software they have already purchased, say 5%.. 76+5 = 81. Hey, now we're down to 19% piracy. Strangly, I didn't see anything about those numbers in the BSA's whitepaper... Any ideas why?
Now, if that makes sense to anyone, could you please explain it to me? I think I've confused myself.
The problem is that digital software can be exactly duplicated; this is not true for ocean front homes. Just because it is illogical to correlate desire to piracy for real world physical objects, does not mean it is for things like software.
It is just as illogical. To say the difference between demand and sales is piracy is idiocy. It assumes that everybody who wants some software but doesn't buy it, pirates it. Get a grip.
Igor
Actually, I believe the story was referring to this . If you look in the methodology appendix in the aforementioned white paper, it refers back to this (or rather the previous year's version). The white paper discusses the benefits to a country's economy from dissuading piracy.
One of the major problems I see with the methodology is that it assumes that the rate of usage for a particular piece of software is the same in every country as it is in the US. I.e. if 4% of computers sold in the US use MATLAB, then 4% of the computer's sold in Vietnam must be using MATLAB, whether bought or pirated. Multiply the number of computers sold in Vietnam by 4%, subtract the number of copies of MATLAB sold in Vietnam, and the remainder must be pirated copies! They then conclude that countries which have a lower calculated rate of piracy have a better software industry. Now, if it happens to be that countries with a better software industry use MATLAB more, then it makes it look like countries that don't are pirates. This would also generate the conclusion that piracy means a bad software industry, but would be an artifact of the measurement methodology.
Note that I am only using MATLAB as an example app, and just because the methodology is poor doesn't mean that there isn't lots of copying in Vietnam.
I think the way they come up with their numbers is taking the number of new computers sold each year, guessing how many are for the workplace, assuming every work computer uses Windows and Office and a ratio of how many use whatever other packages (Photoshop et.al) and how many are for professional homes, assuming all the home users use Windows and guessing from the home users what percentage uses Office ... then comparing that number to the number of sold licenses of Windows, Office, and whatever.
If Intel and AMD combined sell 100 million CPUs this year and Microsoft only sells 60 million seats of Windows, then 40 million computers are using pirated OS. Same sort of thing with Office, etc...
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
As natural bodies of water and their beaches belong to the public, 100% of beachfront homes are "pirated" if they deny the public access to what's theirs. Softare can be thought of in the same way. BSD, GNU and other projects show that programmers would have the public use their code rather than have it perverted and exploited by a bunch of greedy grabber marketeers like the BSA and Microsoft. Like the oceans, there is little the BSA can do about free software but lie and avoid the issue. Who wants bottled stagnant code when you have all the free software in the world? Once artificial barriers are removed, those who really want resources will have them and all this "pirate" nonsense will fade away like a bad dream.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ok, I'll just follow this piracy-calculation-argument through with physical property.
Q: Suppose you own a 13" Sony television set. While you're out, a thief breaks into your home and steals it. You file a police report, and the next week buy an identicle new TV. How much money has sony lost?
A: They have lost one television set that the theif would have bought from them if he hadn't stolen it.
Q: Suppose the exact same situation, but you also happen to have a massive plasma screen in the family room that was too bulky to fit in the thief's car, so it was not stolen. How much has sony lost?
A: They are out the price of the flat screen. It's what the thief really wanted, after all!
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
It used to be that commercial software had copy protection, but Microsoft distributed there without any, so soon many people were sharing their floppies. Microsoft knew that once they had the home users hooked, they would demand the same software at work, where they could really hit em hard. It worked, Ashton Tate, WordPerfect and Lotus are now effectivly destroyed and Microsoft is now aiming to extract the revenue from the home user it has been missing.
The worst part of the numbers is the aggregration of the different countries piracy rates into a single number. The North America rate of 24% doesn't really sound that high when you consider the possible margin of error for this study.
Does the BSA have the same clout in other countries? Are they using the 39% number to convince local lawmakers about the severity of the problem to give themselves more power?
It is probably in software companies best interest to have rampant piracy in poor countries so that they can get a lock on the market. After gaining control, they convince the gov't to enact new legislation and enforcement ensuring large profits.
Piracy is a violent crime which continues in many parts of the world, often resulting in the death of its victims.
What the BSA are talking about here is the illegal copying of software.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
...but...but...I get SEASICK!!!
However i usually buy a program if I find it very useful, like trillian and mailwasher. Trillian pro is easy to get and after testing it out for a about two months I bought it. I dont think id buy it if Id only test the freeware version which imo is butt ugly and bloated-looking.
a little OT
Trillian pro is small (square not rounded corners like ICQ "Lite!"), beautiful (whistler like skin), and excellent chat history function that actually works compared to buggy ICQ lite. Check more HERE
Mailwasher saves me a lot of time going through/identifying and deleting spam, Im an annoying beta tester for their CFS system now and it looks extremely promising if they fix and add some serious issues. Extremely as in getting me very efficient and only bothered (email notification beep) when I get mail not identified as spam. (Also blinking tray icon and max/min animation you cant turn off is extremely annoying and slowing me down BAD MAILWASHER BAD!)
Many of us are perfectly content to continue to use software we purchased legally years ago - and just because BSA members have tried to force upgrades on us and our software, well, it still just works, and we refuse to submit to planned obsolescence. I expect we are lumped in the 'pirate' category too.
Remember, Gates himself said the biggest threat to Win 98 was Win 95.
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
According to stats I heard while watching Animal Planet, RATS cause over $19 BILLION dollars in damage every year. Actual damage. From what I've read, software piracy costs the industry a heck of a lot less money.
The BSA is after the wrong "filthy rats" this time.
The bottom line is that these guys are claiming to have discerned a 1% drop in an area of the piracy chart that must inherently be extrapolated from real world data. Given that even the interpolated statistics based on the real world data would already have a margin of error of more than 1%, there's no F-ing way that you can discern a 1% variance in data they haven't even measured.
How convenient that the first two letters of the association's acronym are BS.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Good stuff, but the "???, dead at ???" generator has a minor bug. The "nationality" bit needs to be fixed-- it works if you write "American," because the result reads "an American icon," but if you have a nationality that starts with a consonant (i.e. Canadian), it shouldn't read "an Canadian icon."
Keep up the good work!
And we can also assume that all the people living in those homes are pirates. The question becomes, where are they parking their ships? ARRRRR!!
The data comes from 1996-2001, still well inside the "new economy bubble" (or shall we say financial institutions driven "scam") that drived a lot of investors into totally insane multimillion projects. No wonder that the growth of the IT sector looks so good, when you look at 1996-2001 data.
Also pay attention to the "Hungary success story". U$ 729 Million increase in revenues from 1995 to 2001 and only 9000 new jobs in 6 years. Consider Hungarian average wage, exchange rate , inflation and you see that this revenue are either vaporware or...weren't left in Hungary for investment. If we pay even more attention, job may mean "job position" or "kinds of jobs". Guess that they could have specified that. Even if it's 9000 new "kinds of jobs" that means absolutely nothing, everybody today is an Executive Vice President Junior Senior Major Minor of something.
I could go on but I'd rather read a good comic that this comic (that was probably grossly overpaid too).
With these methodologies you have to wonder...
Here's some conspiracy thoughts:
Somewhere deep in the bowels of BSA headquarters there's a group of people who have this all planned out.
BSA Drone #1: Okay, first year we'll say piracy dropped a small amount thanks to our efforts. This will convince the companies and congress that our efforts are successful, but we need more help.
BSA Drone #2: Right, then during year 2 we'll get some more laws passed and get people used to more extrememe copy pretection.
BSA Drone #1: Right! They bought into the XP activation, now we can roll out the next step.
BSA Drone #2: Which is...?
BSA Drone #1: Tying activation to a bank account! It's the only way to be sure they're not pirates! Then when we have that in place we'll report a drop of 5% and complain loudly about OSS making it impossible to do audits.
BSA Drone #2: So stage 3 is requiring all government and big business customers to go 100% closed source. Brilliant!
BSA Drone #1: Let's get a taco.
What you just said pretty much sums up the way Adobe protects it's software. Adobe isn't stupid, and they sue the pants off anyone who treads on them; however Photoshop, AFX, Illustrator, and Premier have the one of the easiest products the pirate since I can remember. Why.. like you said.. people try it, they love it, one day they buy it for business use.
Copyright violation is neither piracy nor theft.
I'll grant that under the legal definition of "theft" you are correct. But the term "piracy" has come to include infringement on any government-granted monopoly.
It is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Copyright infringement is a crime.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I know...ermmm...some people... who pirated professional software development packages when they were younger in order to learn software development to obtain employment skills, and later when he became employed as a developer he PAID for those tools by buying a full copy of the latest version. (Emphasis mine)
Umm... I have never heard of anyone buying (or otherwise obtaingin) a package to learn software development.
Software development is what you learn in a Computer Engineering/Software Engineering curriculum. If you go to a good school, the professors force you to write standard C or C++ (i.e., no using proprietary libraries or functions), so that you learn concepts regardless of the tool that you use.
Basically, your agurment falls apart. If someone is well educated and understands the concepts and theories (be it software development, photo editing, or network admin) then they know how it works and learning the tool is only a matter of a couple of weeks to get up to speed. If you buy the tool and it takes you two years to learn the concepts underlying what you do with the tool, then you are wasting your time.
Why did the pirate go to the movie?
It was rated "arrrr".
Where do pirates eat?
Arrrrby's.
A pirate walks into a bar with a steering wheel attached to his groin. The bartender asks what the deal is with the steering wheel.
The pirate replys, "Arrr, it's driving me nuts!".
If you want Photoshop for personal use, and can't afford the full deal, buy Photoshop Elements. If you want to find out what the difference is between Elements and the full package, you can get a save-disabled demo of Photoshop from the Adobe website to try out.
Seems to me Adobe have been working pretty hard to give you options that don't involve breaking their licence terms and still getting to use their software.
If you still object, then take a look at GIMP. I see no reason for pirating Photoshop.
How many companies/users has BSA extorted?
90% of their piracy "statistics" are probably open source/free/"Free" software anyway. The BSA is an organization created and run by big for-profit software companies. Their reason for existing appears to be making up FUD and shaking down those who don't use BSA member's software. 99.9% of their statistics are made up crap.
Just think of the whole OpenOffice scandal.
OK, I admit to not reading ALL the comments but with the current signal to noise ...
...
I have a question, what was the estimated piracy last year? If they reduced the value by 1% and say the 'value' was Ohhhh 1 billion, then they 'saved' 10 million dollars. What did they spend? Is this justification to put them out of business, "Give us 100 Million and We'll save you 10 Million". So what was the ROI of those bankrolling the BSA? -- Just asking
We assume you are talking about yourself.
OK, mod me down, I'm posting AC so I don't care, but here goes.
The above wasn't my post. However, it offends me to no end that a bunch of jackasses who supposedly believe in free speech and freedom of discussion consistently mod down anything that is possibly anti-linux as a troll. Parent had a valid point - slashdot readers tend to swallow anything if it's pro-linux, and criticize anything anti-linux. The tool moderators have served to prove his point.
Isn't it about time that you morons can use your mod points to do something OTHER than mod down posts you don't like?
think at first that the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) had done this study? Pattern recognition is such a bitch.
Dear Michael:
Shut up. If you have a comment about an article, leave a comment in response. Keep your poorly-formed analogies out of the submission itself please.
BSA's whole premise for existence is that there is rampant piracy going on. They'd never admit that the piracy rate was more like 1-2%, because the companies that fund the BSA would consider that "acceptable" and realize that the BSA exists only to pay for itself. The BSA needs to be a FUD-monger to ensure it's own existence.
The BSA would HATE for strong copy protection to be enforced, because it would shrivel up and die shortly thereafter. If the software vendors would release crippleware versions of their products for folks to try, sales would increase and the BSA would probably die off. Sounds like a deal.
If Intel and AMD combined sell 100 million CPUs this year and Microsoft only sells 60 million seats of Windows, then 40 million computers are using pirated OS
There *might* be ways to guess the actuall numbers, but this definetely cannot be it.. I can by a P-4 this year and load it with my 5 year old win98 cd or my 1 month old redhat cd. I guess i would be a pirate if i *didn't* uninstall win98 from my old pc, but somehow i don't think that this is what they are talking about. (or maybe it is, then the whole thing is just funny)
Washington bullets will simply be known as the "Bulle
They have to, since they don't actually go after larger businesses, only the tiny, five-or-six-person mom and pop shops.
When I was unfairly let go from my previous employer, I decided to hit 'em hard by contacting the BSA. As I was the Network Manager, I could tell them about pretty much every piece of pirated software, and I did. I went to the BSA site and filled out a report documenting hundreds of missing licenses for MS Office, MS Exchange, a number of Adobe products, and a few from Macromedia (all of their big vendor companies). I even documented how Lotus SmartSuite is installed on about 300 computers, yet we only had 4 legal copies, not to mention all the small shareware-type shit (like SnagIt and WinZip) that was installed on almost every PC without one legal license in the place.
I documented the "plan" we had in case of audit...it seems you can refuse them entry the first time they drop by for a visit, but they come back later that day with sherrifs and a warrant to force the issue. More than enough time for use to ghost a pirated-clean image on all the machines (using a pirated copy of ghost, of course). We even went to the trouble to compile a list of every machine that had pirated software so we could quicly decide which ones would need ghosting first.
Finally, I documented the little utility one of the members of the IT staff was forced to write ("it's written, or you're out of a job") to bypass the licensing restrictions of MS Terminal Services. I even gave them a link to the company's website where they could download it (it was up there so the salesmen could get it at home).
And, what happened? Nothing. For three months I called every week to see what the status was, and was told each time that there was nothing new to report. It was in the hands of the member companies. Finally, I was told that one of the member companies had decided not to pursue.
When I asked why, I was told they didn't have a reason, but it could be because: "the member company may already be investigating or negotiating with the company, the company may have some kind of site license, or the member company may have some other kind of relationship with the company in question." None of these were the case (I still have contacts in the IT department).
No, the truth is, the BSA simply can't walk into a large company and tell 500 people to get off their machines for a day while they're audited. It's logistically impossible. So, they advertise lots and lots of threats, send out "truce" notices, and make a lot of people worry about nothing.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
These statistics seem perfectly logical...
I mean, we all know that 100% of all people will resort to any means possible in order to obtain something, if they can't afford it.
Come on now, in this day and age, who among us really goes without something they want?
Good to see that michael is again replacing facts with fictions. Demand is not who wants something, it's who will buy it (at a given cost, etc). Now, how to calculate demand is a different matter... but just because I want something, doesn't put me on the demand curve. If I buy it (or will buy it at a given price), that places me there.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
Piracy losses are tax deductible... Of course the monetary value of the loss is going up. Economic downturn? What economic downturn?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
...what exactly?
If these studies are based on sound logic, I think Natalie Portman's lawyers will be in touch with most of you reading this very shortly.
\\ Mitch
Thank you for not making a lame joke about the
Boy Scouts of America.
I'm pretty sure that Linux use is increasing faster than that.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am pretty sure that is how they do it. I have seen statistics from them showing how there are 1.68 new computers sold each year for every copy of (Windows or Office, take your pick) and if you do a little magic math (1/1.68 = .595) you see a 59.5% legitimate purchase rate, or almost exactly the 40% piracy rate they claim.
... but hey, there are lies, there are damn lies, and there are statistics.
OSS, Linux, StarOffice or whatever, and folks that retire a machine and migrate the software they paid to use all skew that number
It would be a pretty easy way to boil up numbers for 3rd world countries, just figure out how many computers get sent there in a given year, figure out how many copies of legit software get purchased, simmer on high for 5 minutes and Voila! cooked books.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Could it be that there are fewer dotcoms around this year then there were last year?
Or perhaps they only count companies with operating budgets larger than $1 Million per.(who could afford to pay the fines.)
Again, that number too is down from last year.
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
When did the Boy Scouts of America begin generating statistics about software piracy???
:q!
In other words, some guys sat in a room and decided that people probably wanted to buy ten copies of software, but only five were sold, so the piracy rate must therefore be 50%
Aye, nice math, matey.
I think that the BSA (what an appropriate acronym, BTW) must be overlooking Red Hat's piracy rate: that's right, a steady 0.0%. How they acieve that must be relative to their pricing scheme for their software, one must conclude.
do you know what the -HUP flag does? it restarts the daemon. don't you really want kill -9(kill the process and all its children?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Well ya got me there.
In the article I thought the following was hysterically funny:
"The study was conducted for the Business Software Alliance by International Planning and Research Corp. The piracy rate was calculated by comparing the researchers' estimates on demand with data on actual software sales."
Its painfully clear that the math used here is foundationless, therefore I feel free at taking 'Pot' Shots at the article's logic. To me its obvious that the researchers used the SWAG method. To the unwashed it means 'Scientific Wild Ass Guess'. The SWAG method is a love child of the WAG method.
I also added in a viewpoint strongly suggested by my some of my ancestors that those who 'sold' land here were 'pirates' also. Point in case is that the indigenes peoples of North America had no concept of 'land ownership' in their culture. If one bothers to read the 'Date Line' of the article, it says 'New York'. I wonder if anyone considered the 'Manhattan Purchase' to be anything less than accepted criminality.
The Irony is that the study was done by people who studied others 'piracy', that are living on land that was 'pirated'.
"The study looked only at business software -- general applications like the Office suite and antivirus programs as well as niche software titles like AutoCAD for architects and designers. Games, personal finance and other consumer programs were not included."
Of course with so many busineses cutting staff and going under it really isn't any surprise that software sales have gone down. They probably get their data from those little registration cards - "X - I plan on buying software in the next 6 months" but then no money or company 6 months later.
I really see no reason to upgrade working software except to keep it working with the latest OS. When old programs don't work right on the new OS they blame the old program.
I wonder what other groups of data were omitted from the study.
I got laid off so I got a business license and started trying to make a little money on the side. (Any one want a Mexican Samuri Sword?)
About a week after I got my license I got a nasty letter from the BSA. It made a lot of threats. Said that they had the right to inspect my place of business (my home) and gave be a "chance" to get all my software license up to date before they came to tear my compters apart.
My reaction was fairly normal. I ignored them. A couple of weeks later I got another nasty letter. This time I made sure my door locks were solid. I made sure I could find my ammunition and guns in the dark. And, I took every bit of software that I had from BSA members and threw it out. I am now 100% pure open source software.
After reading through a couple of BSA letters and discussing them with a lawyer it becomes obvious that most small business can't afford to *own* software made by BSA members. The legal liability for missplacing a software license is greater than the value of the business. Misplace a license, lose your house, your savings, your kids college fund, your ability to buy perscription drugs...
Stonewolf
The BSA is just measuring software lust. I would have to agree that it is around 39%. There's bunch of crap out there with a price on it that you couldn't give me.
SCO has sued the BSA for a billion US$ for failing to prosecute LUNIX hackers after a massive theft of a couple hundred lines of UNIX code....
No, seriously, I just come here for the articles.
The problem is that digital software can be exactly duplicated; this is not true for ocean front homes.
That doesn't really change the point he's making. What he's saying is that just because someone has the desire to buy something does not mean that they will or are able to buy it.
With an ocean front house the limited supply drives up the price, making it so that most people cannot afford such a house. While the supply is less restricted for software there are other factors that can drive the price of software up to the point where it is unaffordable (or at the very least not cost justified).
And just because I want a $300 piece of soft ware does not mean I can afford it. And just because I wanted it but didn't buy it doesn't mean I stole it.
When I got my laptop this year, I installed a (legitimate) copy of MS Word 95 I had, because my Word 97 had an OEM license. I thought this made me overly anal about licenses. Apparently, according to the BSA, this makes me a pirate, as I had a demand for the software this year, but didn't make a purchase.
The logic is really too easy to mock. A Hollywood movie flops? The movie quality isn't low, it's just a lot of people must have snuck in--after all, ticket sales didn't match demand estimates. Levi's sales troubles? It's clearly those Hong Kong knockoffs. Any failed product becomes, by definition, a bust due to counterfeiting or theft, not bad projections, marketing or design.
Bull Sh!t Anonymous ??
or Bull Sh!t Androids ?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
And, following their logic, this means you have 300G of pirated software on your pirated Mac. You're in trouble, pal, BIG trouble.
lawyers, insurnace salesmen, and the BSA
lick the cancle button (at least thats what our Chinese QA says)
I'm glad people like you let us know slashdot is still humming.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
1) Elements sucks. Really, it does. Or you have to pay for good plugins anyway, so what's the point. OTH, if all you're doing is touching up digital pictures, I'd recommend it.
2) Save-disabled demo? Useless. The idea is to get PhotoShop into your workflow. It's only useful if you already have a copy and what to see what changed.
That being said, I use GIMP. I've pirated PhotoShop now and then, and because of that, I appreciate it. If I ever was in a situation where I _needed_ Photoshop, I'd buy it. And that's thanks to ease of pirating, not 1) or 2) above.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Oracle.
No one in their right mind would pick that beast to learn databases except it can be gotten easily without restrictions.
And now every bozo on ExpertsExchange is asking about some Oracle-specific extension.
Figures.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
BSA "creates" numbers to justify itself as relevent. Is this really new news?
My mind is a world of sexual perversion, and I don't think baby bath photos are child pr0nography. Watch the generalizations.
Freedom: "I won't!"
One problem I have with this whole thing is the unsumption that 'piracy' is always moraly and legaly wrong. Personaly, I would have thought that it was. But if 39% (and that is down from about 50% a few years back, according to the chart in article) of software is really pirated, that implies that about 40% of all software users -- probably a good subset of the generaly population in North America -- are acting illegall and by the current attitudes should probably be locked up. But if so many people are going ahead and doing it, how can companies in a democratic nation complain too much?
Presumably they have to justify their existence by showing that there is a lot of infringment out there - nobody would believe it if they said 99% of software was copied against the word of the licence, and vice versa, if they claimed that 1% was being illegally copied people would ask why they were bothering.
So I guess their chief of marketing said "hmmm, make it a small amount less than last year, to show we're having an effect, otherwise our customers will decide we are not worth it".
So, does this mean PC sales are up or down? If sales are up, but piracy stays the same, the stats would be down. On the other hand, if the sales are down, the piracy growth rate would be down too...
they should be pretty worried when they reach 0% - no-one wants they're offering.
WHAT!? Correlation does not demand causality. Ever think that maybe the piracy rates are lower in better-off countries because they have the disposable income to buy the freaking stuff?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Actually, this is goatse.cx in ASCII:
http://goatse.cx/contrib.html
Hey, I've been a member of Slashdot for years (check my number) and this is my first post ever! =)
It's been my experience that whenever there is a change in CEO, many other top level positions get "new blood" too. Usually withing a few months of the
CEO change. After my company changed ownship, our COO left, VP's changed, organizations withing the company merged, and heck, our local VP just left the company today. It's like a big rollercoaster ride. Hehe.
I can't afford a sig!
an increasing number of M$ users jumping ship for Linux??
There is no piracy in Linux hence lower numbers..
How can you steal something that's free???
BSA? Isn't that Boy Scouts of America?
It turns out the BSA is spreading their nonsense around the world.
I just read a hungarian online newspaper, and BSA Hungary states a drop from 49% to 45% over there.
-Tomaj
It's incorrect to say that 0% of prime numbers are even, as that would imply no prime numbers are even (and 2 is both even and prime). What is correct is that an infinitesimely small percentage of prime numbers are even.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The statistics for Windows/Office piracy are probably fairly accurate -- almost everyone really does have a copy of Windows and Office on their computer. Sure, some new computers are sold to people who put Linux or FreeBSD or whatever on them, but that's probably in the 1-2% range, not in the 30% range. There are a lot of people who pirate Windows and Office. And a lot of that really is lost sales -- with better enforcement, a lot of those people who buy Windows/Office, simply because they don't see the alternatives as legitimate alternatives (how many non-technies do you know who seriously are considering buying a non-Windows PC for their next PC purchase?).
Statistics for other software is much more suspect. I'd imagine that many of the people who pirate, say, Photoshop, would just use something cheaper with fewer features (like Paint Shop Pro) if enforcement was better and they actually had to pay for their software. So those numbers are likely quite inflated.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This thread's percentages are up 48.314159E^32% from the last ones!
;)
But seriously, think of the definition of pirates. Pirating is when you threaten violence to steal riches (usually in the form of chests with gold inside). Piracy is done in 4 stages:
1. Invasion (boarding the poor bastard's ship)
2. Threatening (sometimes coupled with killing)
3. Stealing (to grab the loot)
4. Burying (like banking but without the questions and fees)
Now, as far as I know, there is no invasion in software piracy, no threatening by the theif, there is stealing I guess and I'm sure there is no burying! Maybe piracy should be called unauthorised discounting!
If you buy MS programs I guess you could call it paying what it's worth
Wouldn't it be funny if that BSA report was typed on a pirated copy of word?
My WinXP Pro's product key starts with FCKGW - does yours?
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
What I found particularly ironic was at a prior company that I worked for, several employees felt perfectly at home copying pirated software (games, Office, etc) while at the same time going to great lengths to add copy-protection to the very software we wrote and sold.
I guess pirated software was okay as long as it was *someone else's* profits that were being ripped off..
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
That joke was only made about 500 other times, 100 of which were first posts!
You're so incredibly funny!
Not!
So Hilary Rosen is doing some moonlighting and writing BSA's press releases now? Or is it Jay Berman?
Sheesh, when I was a Boy Scout, we just organized things like paper drives.
Check kuro5hin front page, there is an article about infinite that explains 1/infinite quite well.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Would it be possible that somebody in the US points out this "statistic" to a trade agency, media watchdog or similar to pursue it under false advertisment, deceiveful information or something like that?
/. as their sole punishment.
Let the goverment or NGOs deal with them. They can't keep lying and only getting a bad article in
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You cannot divide by infinitely (or a quantity that is infinitely large), because it is not a number. All you can say is that as x gets arbitrarily large, 1/x gets arbitrarily small, which is not the same as saying 1/inf = 0, which is convenient shorthand, but not strictly true. You can never get to 0, only arbitrarily close to it.
And I know what a percentage is. A percentage is the ratio of events under consideration to total events multiplied by 100. The only way to make x/y = 0/100 is if x = 0 (as discussed above, x > 0 and "y = inf" is not rigorous). See here for more discussion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I was in the Boy Scouts of America forty years ago, and we never, ever audited computers. Of course, we didn't know what computers were back then so I guess that explains it.
And my point is that while what you're saying is convenient shorthand, it is not correct. You cannot rigorously express as a decimal number the percentage of primes that are even, because it is not a finite number. It is a quantity infinitesimely close to zero (but not equal to zero). aleph0 is not a real number, so one cannot divide by it to get a real number: 1/aleph0 is not arithmetic, but rather a shorthand way of expressing a limit. If, on the other hand, you were to claim "the limit of 1/x as x->inf is 0", then I would agree with you, but this is not identical to the statement "1/inf = 0," which is a nonsensical attempt to use arithmetic operations on a non-number.
In short, you can only perform real-value arithmetic on real-valued quantities, of which infinity in its various guises is not one.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
First of all, your condescending attitude is rather irritating. Second of all, you're still quite wrong.
Your statements now are exactly what I've been saying all along -- "1/aleph0" is shorthand for "1/x approaches 0 as x->inf." Note the use of the qualifier "approaches".
In any case, the main point is that infinitesimals are not the same thing as "0", though they are arbitrarily close.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One use of percentages is that they allow one to calculate the number of items meeting some criterion given the size of the domain. If 25% of your houses are in disrepair and you own 4 houses, then you have one house in disrepair. In general, percentage * domain_size = items_meeting_criterion.
If the percentage of even numbers that are prime were exactly zero, then the total number of even prime numbers would be zero: 0*x as x->inf is still 0. This is clearly not the case, since there is one even prime number. Thus if the percentage of even numbers that are prime is well-defined, there must be some percentage p such that p*x approaches 1 as x->inf. p=0 clearly does not fit the bill. Neither does any other real number: only the infinitesimal fits the bill, which as you can see does not behave identically to 0.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Your logic is severely flawed, of course. ;-)
My guess is, 50 million copies of windows end up on the 50 million dual CPU systems your sales figure indicates and... well... I suppose those 10 million surplus windows CDs ended up alongside the AOL CDs in some landfill somwhere... Or maybe Microsoft lied about selling those, to keep their shareholders happy.
I don't think probabilistic statistics are really relevant here, since this is an entirely deterministic problem -- you're not taking a sampling, because you have complete data. If a newspaper poll actually did poll every single person in the country, then they'd have a margin of error of +/-0% in their statistics of what people in the country think.
In any case, I suppose what I'd say is that "the proportion of prime numbers that are even is infinitesimely small."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10