Software Piracy Will Get Worse

gollum123 writes "According to a study done by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and research firm IDC, it is likely that software piracy will continue to expand as the Internet grows. Worldwide revenue loss due to software piracy was estimated at $33 billion for 2004 with about 1/3 of the software used being illegal. But within five years, that number could boom to two-thirds, with the value of pirated software nearing US$200 billion. Countries with the highest piracy rates were Vietnam, Ukraine, China, Zimbabwe and Indonesia while United States, New Zealand, Austria, Sweden and the United Kingdom had the lowest."

Comments

Growing Trend?

[lecithin]

"software piracy will continue to expand as the Internet grows"

In other news, the porn industry is getting larger as the Internet grows as well.

Web attacks are on the rise too.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=147388&cid=123 49249

Increased Users = Increased Users (for good or bad)

Is this news?

The question should be "Has software piracy increased disproportionately to Internet User growth?

I don't know.

Price it right and it gets copied less

[Nf1nk]

The most commonly copied software I hear about are.
1. Windos OS of the month
2. microsoft office
3. Adobe Photoshop
Why? because they are all way over priced, and have acceptable free alternatives. If software is priced properly then it is not worth searching through the virus and bug ridden back alleys of warez looking for the latest version. The free versions aren't used by as many people because there is a percieved lack of quality in them.
(I said percieved. I used open office in 2001 and it was good except the spread sheet program didn't do curve fits worth a damn. That feature is important to me so I bought Office)

Re:Crazy predictions

[ThosLives]

You're right that their numbers don't make sense. The one assumption they have is that they could sell the entire volume out there at its current price to come up with the "value" of pirated software. This is fundamentally flawed, as the value of the software that is currently pirated isn't the price of the software, it's the risk involved with the piracy. I've said it before, but it's not possible to claim damages based on unpurchased resources - especially when the resources are not scarce.

I think software businesses need to go back to basic economics: the value of non-scarce resources is very low. I think that the only way for the software industry to remain viable is not to be strict on piracy but become a service industry: we will write programs and support it for a fee. Basically this means anyone can use the software, but new software won't be written and existing software won't be supported without payment. Because the actual executing code isn't scarce, it has very little value: the value is in creating that software and keeping it running.

This is very similar to the *IAA issues: the value isn't in the distribution of the art, but in the experience of listening to it and having new music created. This is why I think that software isn't a "real" commodity but a service. (Also why I think information should not be property - information is not 'scarce' and so cannot be effectively managed using concepts of property. There might be another way to manage it, but it's not with property protection laws).

Anyway, I could go on, but the fundamental thing here is that "unrealised sales" is not equivalent to "lost revenue". Lost revenue is simply poor accounting or "we got less than we did before". The software industry, even if piracy increases, will probably still continue to post revenue gains. So their complaint is "we won't have high enough revenue gains" not "we will have revenue contraction".