Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
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.
Couldn't piracy also have fallen because of the sharp rise of open source software?
. . .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.
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
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!
Is that what this group believes?
I'm pretty sure we all find spam to be terribly annoying, but I for one don't think it costs me much more than time and energy... Granted, I'd rather NOT have to expend those in an effort to keep my penis from growing so large it frightens everyone I meet.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
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.
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. ..."
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!
It's about as accurate as claiming that every car can kill someone in an accident, so we are all using illegal murder weapons.
In fact, we should all pay an extra 10% when we buy a car as 'possible killer charge', just like the bogus charges we have to pay for VHS tapes and recordable CD's and DVD's...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
> Reminds me of this saying "If a pickpocket meets a saint, he sees only his pockets".
In spanish, there's another saying "A thief thinks everyone else is a thief".
The BSA knows full well they they are extorting huge sums of money from companies that are found to have one or two copies of software without "a proper license". What is a proper license? For MS product, it's extremely difficult to have a proper license because site licenses, OEM license, upgrade licenses, and other licenses cover different situations and you need different types of proof for each type of license. Sometimes the "proof of license" is contradictory so you're in a no-win situation.
Most companies can't afford to have a department who's sole job is to track licenses and even when they do, the beaurocracy is so great that people tend to be sloppy about licenses. Companies that want to comply essentially have to pay for licenses twice or three times in order to be sure that they're conforming.
When a non-conforming company is found, it's threatened with a lawsuit for 1000s of times the amount of the "illegal" software.
The BSA is a thief, so naturally, it's paranoid about other thieves.
"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
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
I'm glad they are using the metric of demand verses sales. On the surface, it looks like hey have reduced piracy by having more people properly buy licenses for all their closed source software. This assumption can be wrong. I feel that properly intertepeted, it clearly shows that with the rise of open source, piracy decreases. Competion which breaks a monopoly does reduce the piracy of a monopolists product. An affordable product that works better does reduce the demand for a high priced alternative. The very real legal risks in the EULA of closed source software are a great reason not to pirate the closed source. OSS products now are low cost and low legal risk. Did sales increase or demand drop? They must be hiding the fact sales did not increase to meet the demand otherwise they would have been proud to report it.
Let's face it, demand is down for closed source. OSS is a legal alternative to high prices and piracy. Good job BSA convincing us casual copying is bad and helping draw excelent free publicity to the open source movement. It's the best publicity stunt you have done for us. Thank You Very Much!
The truth shall set you free!
The human body is 50 - 65% water depending on age and weight. Children's bodies can be as much as 75%. 2/3 = 66.6666666%, so this statistic is incorrect.
Regular dice have six sides with one through six spots. That means that each regular die (singular for dice) has one side with 2 spots, which is 1 out of 6, or 1/6 or 16.66666666% - not 17% - you were close, but incorrect.
The dice number would've been incorrect if it said 17.0%, but 17% is imprecise enough to imply a range between 16.5% and 17.5%.
Same thing for 2/3. And no, 2/3 does not automatically indicate infinite precision 0.66666... 2/3 equals base-three 0.2, which is broad enough to cover the whole range of 50-75%.
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.
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
No, becasue then they'd lose sales to "honest" people. Also, it costs nothing to distribute or support pirated software -- the pirates do that. And they don't have any erosion of retail price.
Example, consider developing countries, where close to 100% of software is bootleg (I hate the word "pirate" -- no one is being killed on the high seas, they're copying bits), MS has virtually 100% market penetration. Similarly for other big names, like Adobe Photoshop. No one even considers using cheaper (at retail) software, becasue everything is the same price, about $1/disk.
A few years later, companies come to depend on MS software, designers on Photoshop, and now the US govt starts to pressure the local govt to crack down on piracy. Within a few years at least half the previous users of bootleg software have gone legit, and are on the upgrade treadmill. Notice that lower priced, even locallly produced software never gets a chance to compete.
The data comes from 1996-2001, still well inside the "new economy bubble" (or shall we say financial institutions driven "scam") that drived a lot of investors into totally insane multimillion projects. No wonder that the growth of the IT sector looks so good, when you look at 1996-2001 data.
Also pay attention to the "Hungary success story". U$ 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).
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