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Software Industry Shifting Piracy Strategy
Sensible Clod writes "The U.S. software industry's strategy against global software piracy is shifting to focus on claimed economic benefits of copyright protection in response to a new study released by the BSA, according to an article at Internet News. The study concluded that countries with high software piracy rates have more to gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights. The study even claims potential global gains of '2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in economic growth and $67 billion in new tax revenues' by cutting the current global software piracy rate of 35% by 10%."
I think what they think it means is the number of programs on computers, that aren't paid for, vs. the number that are paid for. This doesn't make a lot of sense though. Most people I know have photoshop installed. If they couldn't pirate it, they wouldn't have it. Simple as that. They aren't going to pay $700 for it. Same goes for many other programs that people tend to have installed at home. This includes windows and MS Office. Many people have MS Office Pro installed on their home computers. Very few of them have paid for it. 35%, I think, is the world average. Some countries have rates around 90%, while other countries have rates around 15%. Really, I think they are completely underestimating how much pirated software people have . Lots of people who have paid for the OS, and maybe 3 or 4 other programs, also have 20 programs that they haven't paid form. Meaning that out of maybe 25 programs, they've probably paid for 5. This means they are pirating 80% of their software.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The money you save by pirating software will just be spent on other things you can't pirate... like hardware. The government still gets its sales tax no?
Piracy rate is the amount of booty divided by the time it takes to get it, of course.
Yarrrrr!
badness 10000