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BSA Creates Piracy Statistics

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the thin-air dept.

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.

5 of 675 comments (clear)

  1. subjective world views and causal myopia by zptdooda · · Score: 4, Informative

    "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
  2. Re:Huh? by pkiguruman · · Score: 5, Informative

    I think he means that a lot of people WANT ocean-front homes, but few are SOLD. He's just trying to apply his logic in a wierd way.

  3. Re:Huh? by tuffy · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    In effect, their piracy statistic is more made-up than most statistics, since they're just making up a number of how much pirated software is out there based on what they *think* would have sold.

    --

    Ita erat quando hic adveni.

  4. Laughable by Bazzargh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:And in other news... by Jerf · · Score: 4, Informative

    Better: Infinity, not being a number, cannot divide any other number, so "one divided by infinity" is a meaningless statement.

    Your statement would be better rendered "1 divided by x as x goes to infinity limits to zero." (I'd like to write the actual symbols because I've heard the limit symbol said a couple of different ways; that's my personal preference.)

    If you want to get all mathematical in someone's face, do it right. ;-)