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BSA Says 41% of Software On Personal Computers Is Pirated
An anonymous reader writes "Individuals are turning to P2P networks and auction sites in staggering numbers to acquire or transfer illegal software and in doing so are harming the economy whilst exposing themselves to malware, identity theft and criminal prosecution, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance. Beyond P2P and auction site piracy, the report also draws correlations between Internet piracy and the spread of malware such as viruses, trojans and spyware, which often exploit vulnerabilities in illegal software that does not benefit from security updates provided by manufacturers. Although the correlation is not universal, geographies with high instances of software piracy suffer from high instances of malware."
While you're guessing with such precision, why not choose 42% and grab more nerd eyes?
Because malware never comes with legal software...
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If the BSA was genuinely concerned about software piracy, they'd be actively promoting free and open alternatives.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
What a lousy article - all puff and no content:
- The FA discusses online auction sites as a "hotbed" of trading illegal software. But it doesn't say whether the BSA distinguish between online auctions offering cracked copies for download, pirated installation media or perfectly legitimate resale of software which the seller has no further use for.
- There's no real explanation of how they reached this figure - do they assume a single person using a torrent installs the software once? Twice? Never? Once then decides they don't really need it so uninstalls it?
- Even if the BSA did explain how they reached this figure, how do we know that their methodology is sound and gives reasonably accurate answers? AFAIK there is no methodology that is generally known to give accurate answers to the question of "how many PCs have application X installed, where X may or may not phone home and there may or may not be cracked versions of X in the wild which modify any existing phone-home functionality?"
Thing is, the BSA must know that these numbers are not reliable and that they can't get reliable numbers. I think the reason this article exists is the BSA are seeding the news wires. Who wants to bet that the next thing they'll do is lobby representatives in governments around the world using these bullshit figures and that's the only reason the figures exist?
Maybe they have never considered the fact that there is a correlation between the state of the economy and the amount of pirated software. Maybe they should consider that their prices are far too high to be able to afford. As for harming the economy, my money tends to go towards food rather than software. It isn't like I am saving the money and pirating software, I don't have any money to save.
I'm not sure what the deal is these days but for years, where I worked, there was a deal with Microsoft whereby employees could install Office at home for free. Pretty sure that was the licence arrangment with MS rather than the firms coughing up for licenses.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Oh, but wait... it's a BSA report, which means anyone with a brain already KNOWS it's bullshit. Unfortunately, that means most members of Congress thinking it's true, and I suspect that's their intended audience. It's certainly a not "report" aimed at us. Their goal is to get more laws passed to make them and their masters money, extracted by law from everyone whether they have ever used any of the software in question or not. Another tax on blank media, anyone? How about one on hard drives, CPUs and other components? Pay by the megabyte for connectivity, because obviously we're stealing software? All they have to do is convince Congress-critters it's a good idea, which seems to be shockingly easy to do if you supply enough cash.
Because RedHat, Novell and the others aren't paying them to shill their stuff.
Start with c:\windows. As 95% of all malware hides in there. Bonus it ismost likely pirated anyways.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I think it depends on the user. You have users who call their friend/family member/etc when they have a question, and clearly are not the ones pirating. Then you have the people who know what they are doing (and from my personal experience) quite often do. The reasons everyone gives are different, but there is often a good bit of it. And they are just as likely to install it on that friend/familiy member's computer when they call needing help with Office or whatever ('Oh, this is an old verson, let me upgrade you).
I've mentioned it before. I have a friend that almost refuses to buy music when they can use whatever the current flavor of P2P is to get it. I had a different friend that gladly would download the newest games from torrents and play them. Not to mention the various other indiscretions I or other friends have done. Several people still will email me with a 'hey, do you happen to have a serial number for...' These aren't college students or poor workers from some low-end job. They are often well paid professionals (often in IT). They just don't want to spend the money. It's not some sense of 'information should be free!' or 'software shouldn't be patented!'. They just don't want to spend the money, so while these reports may not have numbers that everyone believes, I certainly have seen it day to day. Just without a metric that I can quote.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Correlation does not imply causation.
Well:
1. Is simply not true. Adware and spyware are common in commercial software.
2. Also not true - the first thing a pirate does is strip out the crap.
3. If you *have* paid for it, it could be infected. That's why you scan everything.
Apparently it doesn't matter which BSA it is - tbey'll both try to bugger you.
Bark less. Wag more.
- If you've paid for the software, it's highly unlikely that it will contain malware or adware.
Unless it comes from Sony or Microsoft...
1) Can't measure it - you can't measure how many people downloaded your software through illicit channels because, by definition, those channels are usually unmonitored, don't keep logs, and aren't subject to easy investigation. You might be able to measure a particular computer at a particular point in time but any measurement being done on "behalf of" the BSA is going to be worthless. You'd have to randomly monitor thousands of PC's in dozens of categories (home, business, mobile, poweruser, etc.) and get permission to report on any "unlicensed" software there, and then chase it up with the company concerned to see if it was actually unlicensed (rather than just using the wrong VLK or similar for convenience).
2) Can't compare it - the chances of those metrics being stable across such countries as Turkey and the US are unlikely.
3) Can't correlate it - Just because malware goes up with pirated installations doesn't mean anything - it just means that the pirates prefer to download porn which may or may not introduce malware... it doesn't mean the malware is in the pirate software.
Statistics are worthless quoted out of context. We have no idea what was measured, how, why, what bias was introduced by the measures, or anything else.
To be honest, I imagine the percentage to be *higher*... I've seen dozens of people with Winzip on their computers who haven't actually bought it but they heard they needed it to open ZIP files. I've seen dozens of work laptops come back with full installations of football games, office, etc.... technically that's copyright infringement ("software piracy") because it's a breach of the license. I expect the true figure to be nearer 80 or 90%.
But then you have the reasoning that it's somehow linked to malware in any way other than "people get malware too"... almost 100% of the home PC's I see have items of malware on them (again, depending on your definition).
If you want to say "copyright infringement is bad and puts £5 on the cost of every game you buy, or £50 on the price of Office", people would listen. Making up bollocks statistics about nonsense correlations just makes me switch off and let's me know that, actually, you're just trying to scare me into buying things because you can't think any other way would work (and thus don't understand software "piracy" at all). I don't pirate, either at work or at home. I just move things to open-source if I can't afford the real package, and I never buy anything without a demo. No demo, no trial version, no purchase. I also don't buy anything with DRM that interferes with my usage of the product. I'm not alone.
Stop spending your time analysing vague correlations and look at those statistics about why people pirate in the first place. Almost always it's cost, convenience and because a certain percentage of those "pirate" downloads are actually your own customers just trying to get the bloody thing working (I've had to break DRM schemes in work in order to be able to install compliant to our licensing - it was tons easier than our negotiating with the company in question to do the same thing). Be open with those stats and then things get interesting: How many pirates, on average, end up revealing upon further investigation that they *already* own the software in question, but the DRM got in the way? Or that they lost the install disk? Or that they needed original media to recover their PC's and it wasn't supplied by the manufacturer? I've seen all three of those and even done the second myself - I needed a particular install disk and it was an emergency and the person I was working for didn't have the original disk to hand. After I ensured that they were entitled to the licences, I just downloaded one and used that instead (after checksum verification). Does that contribute as being "another" PC with pirate software?
harming the economy
Right, like they would have bought it if they couldn't pirate it.
I love this bullshit. As you say, there's no way of telling how many percent of those who pirated would actually buy the software at hand. In my experience often people pirate because they're lazy, meaning they know some program from a while back and instead of looking for a free alternative they just pirate it because they're used to it. But also sometimes they actually need that program, however more often they don't.
Also it's very easy to throw expressions such as "harming the economy" around. But let's think about what this means. If, and we have to remember the big if here, there would be a significant increase in such sales -- instead of people looking for free and/or open source alternatives (which by the way is already happening, anyway let's continue with the hypothesis) -- then in an international aspect this would harm the economy as the national currency would be weakened due to less trade. HOWEVER (one of those important caps moments) -- don't forget that piracy is also an international phenomenon, meaning if all countries have 10% piracy it would be -- in terms of economic balance, exactly the same as if we had 0% -- or 80%.
What about national level? Well at national level the currency would merely shift towards those selling the software, as they collect the fees.
What about the personal economy? Well you would have a slightly stronger currency (given that other countries ignore piracy) yet you would still, at a personal level, make a loss.
Now let's ignore the moral aspects here, you can yell theft all you want but that's another discussion. This discussion was about the economy and how someone tries to bullshit you from this angle to change your mind. Change your mind for the right reasons, if you consider it theft then fine, but don't eat whatever crap that's thrown at you. By using the expressions such as "economy", a very big machine which can be difficult to understand, you can persuade somebody into a lot of things, since ultimately they will tend to feel stupid because they cannot break down the concept and understand how this hurts the economy -- you see no explanation is given, and that's the point of the argument. So if you feel stupid, that's even more of a reason to ask the question: why?
I am the lawn!
Actually, they can write BETTER tools for GIMP because GIMP was created specifically from the ground up to be tooled up like that.
PS "It doesn't do CMYK" is bollocks. Photoshop didn't do it once. Was it unsuitable then? Well people fucking bought it, didn't they?
Or Electronic Arts.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
I do, but they are not copyright infringement sources. If I already own a license, they are simply enhanced methods of distribution or a convinient malware-cleansing caching proxy.
So you justify your piracy and that makes it OK?
got to love people like you.
I suppose I can come up with a reason for anything, like how smokers justify their health care costs because smokes cost so much?
So you pirate music because of an arbitrary value limit you assign and that makes it alright?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
So they are counting "Used Software" as Pirated Software? Most software sold by auctions were used once and then sold via an auction to the lowest bidder. If one sold a book via an auction, it would not be considered pirated, but selling software via an auction is considered pirated? Some software sold via auction is still new and never used, is that pirated software as well? If so how is that different from a friend of mine buying the software new and then giving the copy to me to use as he bought two copies one for him and one for me to use. Is it pirated software then?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Me too, i specifically go for pirate copies of various things because they are typically free of phone home programs, onerous install requirements (eg license codes) and onerous runtime requirements (like putting the cd in the drive - who wants to carry around a stack of low capacity media like cds?)... The pirate copies are better, the fact that they're cheaper is secondary.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
As always, it is unclear just what they consider "pirated". For example, if your company purchases 100% legitimate software via eBay, the BSA will not accept this as your software during an audit. They refuse to accept any and all eBay receipts. Hence, it is quite likely that they have counted all purchases via auction sites as pirated, even though this is clearly not true.
This is only one of many "rules" they apply that make little or no sense. Did you know that possessing the complete packaging of a program, including the original CD/DVD and the enclosed license certificate is, according to the BSA, not proof of ownership? You must have an original receipt, with the company (or individual) name correctly spelled, which explicitly lists the product and version.
The BSA may once have been a way to combat piracy'it has evolved into a monstrosity. Microsoft, Adobe and the other companies should terminate their relationships with it and start over.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.