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BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B In 2009
alphadogg sends a NetworkWorld.com piece going over the Business Software Alliance's latest stats on software theft around the world. "Expanding PC sales in emerging markets is increasing the rate of software piracy, according to the Business Software Alliance and IDC. The rate of global software piracy in 2009 was 43%, meaning that for every $100 worth of legitimate software sold in 2009, an additional $75 worth of unlicensed software also made its way into the market. This is a 2-percentage-point increase from 2008. Software theft exceeded $51 billion in commercial value in 2009, according to the BSA. IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into 'ailing economies.' ... In the United States, software piracy remained at 20%, the lowest level of software theft of any nation in the world. ... The PC markets in Brazil, India, and China accounted for 86% of the growth in PC shipments worldwide." The BSA president said, "Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products." It's unclear whether that was a brag about the industry's robustness, or a result of the industry's low cost of goods sold.
I always think these are stupid, why not throw in the fact that 90% of pirated software is never actually used more than like once or twice if even used at all. Or the software doesn't even function the way it was intended to or it flat out doesn't work. How about the fact that the software most likely wouldn't even be bought in the first place so they aren't actually loosing any money from this because it would not equate to earned revenue. Why doesn't someone come out with a useful report that actually shows these facts. Douches.
Yeah, half-a million jobs for India and China.
As an unemployed American software engineer who was laid off from Microsoft after our project development was offshored to India -- fuck 'em, I say. The Pirate Bay is providing me with the latest in cracked, malware-free installs of Windows 7 and Server 2008. I run Linux at home, but I sell the Windows discs to high school kids for five bucks a pop. Great for beer money.
Few if any industries could withstand the theft of $51 billion worth of their products.
It's a good thing your products aren't being stolen, then...just copied unlawfully.
The industry could do a better job of being sympathetic, if it wasn't so obviously dishonest about its victimization....
BSA discovers way to increase size of anus, so they can pull larger numbers out of it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
You'd think that marketing folks would, you know, interact with customers now and then. If they did, they'd find out that what you're saying is absolutely true.
Aside from a small number of online pundits who advocate its use, although they themselves don't have to maintain or even use such systems, everyone hates cloud computing.
Cloud-hosted systems end up being horrifically shitty. Their performance is poor. Their reliability is poor. Their usability is poor, because cloud environments are so fucking restrictive. It doesn't cost any less than dedicated hosting. Getting reliable, on-time support is nearly impossible. Data security is basically non-existent.
Data loss is a real problem, because all sensible relational techniques and ACIDity have been thrown away in favor of moronic hash tables. The only thing stupider than a cloud computing advocate is a NoSQL advocate.
Cloud computing is the biggest failure our industry has seen. It's even a bigger failure than Windows. At least Windows sort of works, some of the time. Cloud hosting never works. It's always a failure, regardless of who is using, and where it's being used.
Yup - "IDC says lowering software piracy by just 10 percentage points during the next four years would create nearly 500,000 new jobs and pump $140 billion into "ailing economies." "
The question is - WHERE would that money come from?
Chances are, if somehow forced to "go legit" on a particular piece of software, rather than cough up the money, people in third-world countries would instead:
1) Choose an OSS alternative
2) Choose a more reasonably priced commercial alternative (PSP instead of Photoshop for example)
3) Choose no alternative, i.e. choosing to simply forgo that functionality altogether
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Isn't that like saying I lost 100 billion in lottery winnings? How can you lose money you were not going to get in the first place?
did you forget to take your meds?
The more people who use Linux and OpenOffice the less people will be stealing from the BSA members.
So is the BSA pushing the use of free software where people find it to costly to use commercial software?
Somehow I don't think so. But that is the real solution to the piracy.
If you put $51 Billion into the system and the net result is 500,000 new jobs, you're talking half a million jobs at $102,000 each! Even with benefits, you could hire an American for that,
Your math is wrong, let me help you:
500,000 jobs x $13,000 for Indian workers = $650,000,000 in wages.
$51,000,000,000 - $650,000,000 = $50,350,000,000 in dividends for shareholders and bonuses for executives
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Most definitely not. Allow me to explain: If a product in inventory is stolen, you, i.e. the company that owned the goods, can write off the cost of goods associated with that product as a loss from theft.
Similarly, if a person owns a car and it's stolen (and not replaced by insurance), they can write off the depreciated value of the car at the time of its theft.
But you can't write off losses associated with products you didn't actually make because somebody illegally copied your software.
Just like you can't get a tax deduction for "donating" unpaid services (because you'd have to record pay for them, i.e. income, then take a deduction for a donation - net tax impact is zero). However, you can potentially write off other expenses actually incurred as part of a charitable endeavor.
So if you had a bunch of software, in boxes, ready to ship to stores, stolen from your warehouse, you can deduct the cost of replicating the CDs, printing the boxes and so on. But you can't deduct the retail or even wholesale price of the software units stolen.
Since there were no direct costs associated with producing the copied items in this case, you can't deduct them.
Otherwise, everybody would "lose" stuff to theft all the time for the tax benefits. And Uncle Sam isn't *that* stupid. There are certainly tax loopholes out there, but they require a bit more cautious execution to benefit from, or they tend to get legislated away eventually.
Sorry, but the math is still wrong.
First, the actual amount of money lost by the software industry is very close to zero. As in ZIP ZILPH NADA NOTHING. This is because piracy does not equal lost revenue:
1 - There is no software so important that you can't live without it (this also applies to movies, music, etc)
2 - A substantial portion of the population will never buy your product. Never. If they can get it for free they will take it, but otherwise they will simply do without it (see number 1)
3 - Because of points 1 and 2, uncrackable DRM/Copy Protection would produce no significant increase in revenue -- certainly nowhere near the absurd number claimed by the BSA.
Second, even if you eradicated piracy and the software industry really did realize increased revenue of $500 Gazillion dollars (US), the number of jobs created would be very close to zero. We're not manufacturing widgets here. If sales of Photoshop increase sharply they don't need to hire more programmers.
If you put $51 Billion into the system
Except you don't put $51 Billion into the system, you take it from elsewhere. Which means 500K to 1M jobs are lost in other industries, with the funds transferred to the software industry.
Copyright and other IPR are fundamentally taxation systems. They artificially transfer funds from one place in the economy to another; saying $51B more to IPR industries creates more jobs is equivalent to saying that $51B more in taxes would create more jobs.
Of course, calling it 'property' instead of 'tax' makes it much more palatable in political circles.
And for every imaginary dollar spent only 1% of that would actually be spent, because 100% of 15 year olds who downloaded CS5, wouldn't have ever bought the thing.