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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.
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
Before the BSA starts talking about hijacking stuff, perhaps they need to talk to these people about infringing on names.
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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%.
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
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.
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