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%."

Comments

False assumptions

[Anonymous Coward]

'2.4 million new jobs, $400 billion in economic growth and $67 billion in new tax revenues'

It's interesting that these BSA studies always assume that the money that is not spent on software is not spent anywhere else either.

2.4 million new jobs

[slasho81]

[...] 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 [...]

How do you gain economically by protecting intellectual property rights? 2.4 million new lawyers.

If it wasnt for piracy

[future assassin]

Adobe/Macromedia/MS wouldnt have such a huge market penetration. Young pirated software users are the key. Get them hooked onto your product and most likely when they grow up they will buy your software. Kinda like me :)

Re:Software Piracy Rate?

[Sique]

If they wouldn't pirate Photoshop, they would use GIMP, and complain about missing features, some of them would start scratching the itch and bringing GIMP on par with Photoshop, KPT would be recoded from scratch for GIMP, and finally even professional graphic shops would switch to GIMP and save the $700. So in the end no one would ever buy Photoshop, and the coders of Photoshop would be out of work and unpaid. Basicly piracy is the last thing that keeps Free Software from world domination.

Re:Software Piracy Rate?

[laughingcoyote]

Actually, the BSA has a very interesting way of doing it. Decide on the accuracy for yourself.

In effect, they take the total number of computers sold, decide what percentage of those computers "should" be running a given piece of proprietary software, then look at the number of copies sold. The discrepancy between these numbers is the "piracy rate". This type of statistic-making in essence ignores free software/OS's, other types of freeware, "home-rolled" alternatives written by the user themself, and the like. (So, despite the fact that I'm in full compliance with my OS's license by downloading and installing it for free-according to the BSA, I've got a pirated OS!)