Slashdot Mirror
Flaws In a BSA Software Piracy Report?
Ian Lamont writes "The Business Software Alliance has just released its state piracy study (full PDF also available). The BSA says that one in five pieces of software in use in the United States is unlicensed, and notes that piracy rates are highest in Ohio (27%). However, as noted by the Industry Standard, there are problems with the state study, and the way the BSA is presenting the data: the study only includes eight states, and it is making some questionable connections, including the claim that lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to 'hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.'"
because the bsa has really nothing to gain by providing numbers that don't accurately reflect the true situation with regards to the use of unlicensed software.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
'hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.'
By definition, won't most experienced police officers already have jobs? Say, as police officers?
So, according to the BSA, when you don't buy software, you put the cash you didn't spend under your mattress so the city doesn't get any tax revenue from it (past income taxes, I assume).
Man, I'd better check under my mattress when I get home! I might just be RICH!
is this: if a company pirates (arrrrr, mateys!) a piece of software, they immediately take the money that would have been used to buy that software and stick it in an underground vault, never to be seen or spent again. That's why the state gets no tax revenue.
What a bunch of schmucks.
Do you have ESP?
Heh heh. I'd like to see what happens when the BSA members are told that online purchases of software will be taxed locally and by the states...
I'll bet their maths for calculating lost state and local tax revenue from pirated software would change.
The other factor being, if people couldn't get the 'free as in beer' copies of that software, they wouldn't pay for a legit copy. But that's been rehashed approximately 6.022 x 10^23 times on slashdot, so I won't go any further.
On a side note, why did the BSA have to break tradition and not use an acronym ending in AA? They've made it much more difficult to lump them into the bin with the MPAA and RIAA. Sigh... BSA/**AA is four too many characters.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Just because somebody pirates something doesn't mean they would pay for it if that was the only way. They would instead just NOT BUY IT. The entire premise that if you are losing so much in taxes is bunk. Pirating may cause harm in disrupting some tax money, just not that much.
I mean, honestly, could people even raise that kinda of tax money if they had the cash to buy the software?
import system.cool.Sig;
Not as bad as the RIAA?
Does the RIAA have jack booted thugs that can walk into your office with body armor and machine guns? Do they fine you millions of dollars if you can not produce the receipt for every version of software ever purchased or installed on a machine? Etc.
What they don't tell you is that those 25.000 cops are Indian and working in India to lower the costs.
I think it's time for the Boy Scouts of America to file suit and get their acronym back.
Hey, the World Wide Fund for Nature did it...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Just think about it... There's no tax revenue on Open Source software! People are using it for FREE! It's the end of the government! OH NOES!!!!
Suppose companies were paying salaries with the money they save by pirating software. Then rather than
X * 0.05 = 25,000 police
we would have
X = 20*25,000 = 500,000 unemployed people
So another way of looking at the statistics is that the BSA wants to put 1/2 a million people out of work in each state.
Lies damn lies and statistics, learn to master them.
Jack booted thugs with body armor and machine guns? I would seriously doubt that. If they did, I would love to report myself with a false tip and have them walk face-first into a claymore.
Welcome to Florida, where I can lawfully defend my home and private business with lethal force!
then use your computer with a clear conscience for free...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Not having RTFA or RTFR referred to by TFA, I still have to say I'm amused by the last line in the summary (presumably paraphrasing the report) and its implications to further reports...
"The lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to save the lives of HUNDREDS of poor, sick people, assuming they could afford the hospital costs after becoming poor from buying software regulated by our association."
"The lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to pay the ransom on this CEO's poor daughter, kidnapped by evil software pirates, and because you selfish greedy bastards had to go and murder her by pirating software, they didn't have the money to pay to get her back! I HATE YOU ALL!"
"The lost state and local tax revenue from piracy would have been enough to save the lives of five hundred innocent kittens from being pulverized in our patented BSA Kitten Pulverizing Machine, whose sole purpose is to abduct and pulverize kittens constantly and whose operations may only be tempered by a continuously-accelerating stream of revenue. Why do you selfish pirates want the kittens to be pulverized? It's all your fault, you know."
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
If every big corporation did not out source we could employee 10,000,000 United States Citizens and therefor increase tax money to employ 500,000 experienced police officers.
"Do you pirate software?"
"No."
"Well obviously a filthy pirate like you would lie about it, I'll put you down as a 'Yes'."
I make this point at least once a month.
There used to be an assumption of ethics. If someone was caught in a lie or fabrication, it would be shameful and cause harm to the individual or an organization. Even organizations with which you disagree would probably be telling the truth.
Those days are long gone. There isn't any effort into presenting the truth. No one cares. Everyone merely selects facts that support their position and tosses the rest. If you dare to present opposing facts, it just becomes a dispute.
Look at "intelligent design" for some reason news agencies seem to think they they deserve equal time with actual science. That is no different than putting astronomers and astrologers on equal footing. Yes, Carl Sagan said there are billions of stars, but madam Maria predicts that there only 100,000 and half of them are in retrograde until 2012. Dial in, who do you believe? 1-900-USA-fucked
There is no ethics or common sense. There is no public outcry or demand that public statements be factually accurate. We expect people to lie. We then use the lies we like to bolster our opinions based on our prejudices.
Communication is impossible when everyone is lying.
I have three linux machines at home. Every time I fire one up I run several hundred 'programs', including X, Qt, the TCP/IP stack, flash, firefox, amarok, ipchains. My two little headless linux computers, one disguised as a DSL modem and the other as a firewall, likewise run at least dozens of programs. I know there are tens of thousands of computers hosting websites all over the world that, likewise, are running dozens of 100% free programs.
For their 1 out of 5 statistic to be right, within the United States, there must be a dozen people running nothing but pirated software just to make up for me.
I know nine other people who are, likewise, running multiple computers, including several Windows machines, that have 100% legit/free programs on them. So now we're up to a hundred or so people running nothing but pirated software just to make up for me and my nine friends.
Are there vast underground barracks filled with armies of illegal software users in Ohio and Florida? Is China outsourcing its goldfarming to the ghettos of East LA?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I don't have a home, you insentive clod!
I wonder what their definition of "unlicensed" is. Are they using their definition that unlicensed means you can't find the original invoice for the software? You know, the one where you can have every COA stuck to the case of each machine, but no invoice is considered unlicensed because you can't prove that you didn't buy the licenses after the fact?
Do they consider Open Source code to be unlicensed? Or shareware? Or what?
Are they counting companies that shift licenses around when employees leave and PCs are retired?
Then there's the process the BSA uses to initiate action against an entity. The first thing it does is look at the financials of the company in question.
I know, I submitted a former employer and was told that the company was in poor financial condition and would not be a viable target because of that.
So if you're not making much money, pirate away!
Yeah this is the same flawed logic the RIAA uses. They make the assumption that you would have bought Photoshop, had you not pirated it. Therefore, any pirated program is a loss of revenue in a 1:1 ratio. That simply ISN'T the case. About 11tybillion people downloaded applications that they never would have paid for in the first place. Actual revenue losses are much less than 1:1.
We need many more mental asylums.
The BSA numbers are highly suspect. Here's their forumla:
As Russel McOrmond points out, only two of these numbers are actually known: the number of machines shipped and the amount of legal BSA software. The usage estimate multiplier is an estimate of the average amount of software on a machine in a given region. The essential number, however, may be the amount of legal open source software. How on earth do you calculate that? If it is low, then the piracy numbers could be way off. I distribute some open source code, and even I don't have a clear idea of how many people use it. McOrmond says FLOSS not shipped with a PC is often not included. Read McOrmond's article for an in-depth explanation.
My Mac has only a few BSA apps - the OS, iLife, and Photoshop Elements. How is the BSA to know that I'm also running Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice (all FLOSS), or Scrivener, Tinderbox, and NetNewsWire (all legal non-BSA stuff written by and purchased from individuals)? How about my parents' machines, on which I've installed OpenOffice software? They probably wouldn't remember it was open source even if asked.
This is one major reason to buy retail and not a corporate license.
The only thing that allows them to do this is your consent to inspection.
t
I think it's time for the Boy Scouts of America to file suit and get their acronym back.
Yeah, right. You think they want to piss off the BSA? They'll be back to cutting notches in sticks to calculate their finances instead of using software. The BSA can find issues with anyone's accounting of their licenses.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Eliminating the failed prohibition model "war on some drugs" would result in being able to fire 25,000 cops as "not needed at all", as the main result of said war has been an accelerated crime rate related to black market prices and the associated violence with those huge sums of money. No telling how much savings there, but I would imagine it is in the billions. Switching to free and open source, just with governmental use on governmental machines, and especially if magically it could be retroactive back 10 years or better, would have freed up enough cash to give every person in ohio a free computer on savings over software licensing fees, said fees based completely on the "artificial scarcity" model of busy-ness as it relates to digital copies. And probably allow them to give upgrades every few years as well, using the same exact cash levels they are spending now.
Now mine is thin air and I admit it, but at least it is closer to reality than the BSA and MAFIAA "enron styled" accounting figures, and that tie in with cops and crime was just too obviously *lame*.
In other words, get on board with the anti-piracy program and you will have more revenue to trample peoples rights outside of cyberspace.
Keep in mind that part of the target audience of the report is the law enforcement community who at some point has to see some benefit for themselves if they are going to enforce anti-piracy laws. Notice that they don't talk about it in terms of after school programs, or more teachers. Nope, not here in Amerika. We need more cops damn it! The people are getting too uppity.
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html
I am having difficulty digging up other articles about the BSA using armed police (in some european countries the police carried machine guns) on their audits. IIRC there were a few slashdot articles on this a couple years ago.
Oh, and my bad. It looks like the RIAA does use jack booted thugs with machine guns...
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/magazine/18djdrama.t.html?_r=1&ref=slashdot&oref=slogin
True, so true. However, I only use Ubuntu at home (even my kids use it). My only illegal software is the DVD player hack that let's me watch the DVDs I legally purchased. It kills me that I have to break the law or buy a M$ product.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
. . . I offered to upgrade the office to Vista (from XP) for the boss, he jumped on the opportunity. I also switched office 03 to office 07, installed norton and acrobat 8. It was only about 40 computers.
. . .
When they called to let my boss know they'd be investigating, he asked me if he should be worried. I told him that I was sure that our windows licenses were good for ANY version of windows, and not to worry.
. . .
Since it was my word against my bosses word and he couldn't provide the licenses, he opted to have the computers confiscated (maybe because he didn't have the money?).
So the moral of the story is that it's easy to make unauthorized copies of software and bait a company into being an accessory to it and use the BSA as your personal army to settle your backpay vendetta?
You should consider running for office.
More Twoson than Cupertino
I don't have anyone in my "foes" or "friends" lists. There have been a whole lot of people I have been sorely tempted to put in my empty "friends" list, but this is the first time I ever gave thought to adding a "foe".
I sincerely hope you're just trolling. First your user name - I was a victim of Sony's rootkit.
Second, and finally on topic, do you realise that you are a narc? A rat? A snitch?
And the worst kind of snitch; one who does it for filthy lucre. Judas. I don't care how bad someone mistreats you, only an evil asshole narcs for pay.
If you had any ethics or morals at all it wouldn't have taken a bad experience to get you to turn them in. You would have turned them in because you thought it was the right thing to do, or more intelligently not at all.
You really should consider just how loathed people like you are. I have no idea how you got modded insightful for stating the obvious, then saying you narced on someone, but it I see the comment you just made while I metamoderate, well, like they say on "My Name Is Earl", karma is a funny thing. Now go crawl back under your rock, troll.
Mods, I'm checking "no karma bonus" but mod me down further if you wish. The parent flamebait really pissed me off and I can easily take a downmodding.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I believe the parent was referring to the BSA's ability to get the government to come in on its behalf to seize equipment and software and generally intimate you. RIAA, to my knowledge, still relies on using lawyers who, like stormtroopers, can't hit the broadside of a space ship.
Then perhaps another acronym is in order: RICO
The BSA apparently have a long-established pattern of illegal behavior.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
They are using law enforcement (and therefore public resources) to enforce civil contract and copyright law. That is illegal in many jurisdictions and unethical for most.
One of the articles I had a hard time finding was one that stated that the BSA had armed civilian agents operating in a few places. Either I have a wacky paranoid memory, or my google-fu is weak.
My only illegal software is the DVD player hack that let's me watch the DVDs I legally purchased. It kills me that I have to break the law or buy a M$ product.
You can also buy an Apple product or a DVD player to legally play DVDs. Even the latter is more intelligent than a M$ product ;)
.sig: No such file or directory
Normally, when a product is sold in a state with a sales tax, the business doing the selling collects the tax and submits it to the state. Is the BSA actually doing that with the money they collect for pirated copies of commercial software? Inquiring minds want to know.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars