Slashdot Mirror
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.
My question is always: how much of this would have been purchased if it hadn't been stolen?
Specifically, I'm referring to things like college kids downloading the full version of Photoshop. There's no way those kids are shelling out $500 (or whatever it is) for a full Photoshop license. If they steal it, they just wouldn't have it at all.
From the article, it sounds like it's a case of people acquiring alternatives to software they would purchase--for instance, Windows, or graphics design firms pirating Photoshop. I would wager that nations like China have the highest instances of these sorts of offenses, and that medium-sized businesses are the largest culprits of software theft.
Which is funny, because this is what our main competitor "runs in the cloud" and we're fielding calls daily with their customers wanting to know how soon can they deploy our locally running software because it's faster and they can still work even if their internet connection goes down.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
BSA Says Software Theft Exceeded $51B - Meanwhile...
The IT world says "security issues in Windows requiring IT or Tech work exceeds "Theft" figure many times over".
...nope, I am not complaining... I work in the tech field... as much as I would love to hate Microsoft, I have to hate the fact that I love them. I for one am thrilled that .NET and other "technologies are so easy to exploit. I'm also happy I have karma to burn ;-)
I am very curious how they come up with these figures though. At an average of $100 a piece of software, that's 510 million pirated copies a year. At $200 avg, it's 255 million copies... and so on. Wow... didnt realize it was such a serious issue...
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
In my line of business, if we have a loss that we have numbers for, we put it on our taxes. I suggest they do the same. I'm sure the IRS will be more than willing to audit the hell out of them. Oops, I mean, accept their numbers without question.
Sorry, but as soon as I see numbers like $51 BILLION in software theft being thrown around, I pretty much immediately ignore everything that is to follow because the number, pure and simple, is bullshit. Can I prove that it's bullshit? Nope. Of course not. And that's the point - nobody can prove that it's bullshit so they can bandy it about with impunity knowing it won't be challenged. But, just as I can't prove that it's bullshit, they can't prove that it's remotely valid. And, therein, is why I ignore reports like this - when numbers can't be challenged to ensure their validity, then the person coming up with the numbers can fluff the numbers to help ensure they prove whatever point they are trying to prove.
Bullshit. Pure and simple.
It must be nice to live in a make believe land.
Don't forget Canada, we be all evil and stuff up here!
I am pretty sure you can draw a strong correlation between the fact that the average income in those countries is about 100$ compared to about 50,000$ in the USA. Last I checked a retail copy of Windows 7 is about 200$.
If your having a hard time drawing a conclusion as to why all the piracy, well your not really trying.
No, silly.
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, (provided you avoided union workers).
If they were talking Indian jobs, the figure would be closer to 5 million jobs, and Chinese would probably be closer to 20 million.
Software industry has lowest per unit cost/fixed cost ratio in the world...
Even if you count the 90-day tech support contract that comes with a legit copy of a program?
Nobody who isn't a corporate buisness cares about that, and I should know, because I do that 'tech support' (read: fixing the damn thing) for everyone I know indefinitely. I claim 500 hours of stolen time back from Microsoft! Few if any individuals would be able to withstand that amount of lost wages!
yeah, tech support that is only necessary because of all the bloatware "features", ease of exploitation (shoddy product), and DRM / product licensing headaches. and like another poster pointed out, support cost is eaten by the hardware OEM most of the time, since so few people buy boxed copies of windows. My next copy (since I play certain games which only function on windows) will, however, be boxed because of how terribad OEM "system restore" CDs are. And i'll never need the "support".
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I think your average price for a piece of software is FAR too low.
Windows: $299+ (retail, not upgrade)
Photoshop: $600+ (retail, not upgrade)
MSOffice: $300+ depending on professional/small business/enterprise
AutoCAD: $3000+
Oracle: $$$$$$$ Based on their site review ("how much does it look like your company can afford")
As far as I can tell there are three major flaws in the calculation of this figure:
Firstly, it appears to assume a 100% conversion rate between "pirated copies" and "lost sales". As has mentioned repeatedly in other comments, this is impossible to justify.
Secondly, it seems to presuppose that the Average Selling Price that would be achieved in emerging markets like China and Brazil are the same as the current ASP that they get in the Western world where more of the software is purchased legitimately; this too is unsupportable.
Thirdly, they ascribed zero value to the marketing benefit of people "stealing" software in order to determine if they like it and then going on to buy a copy. Repeated studies in the music market have shown that people who download music buy more music and while the situations are not identical it is clear that many people get hold of pirated software to try it and then buy the software for the support that comes with a legitimate copy once they decide that it does the job. Killing illegal copies of software would therefore likely damage sales that they currently make while possibly bringing in some new sales.
Having run software businesses in the past I appreciate that seeing your hard work ripped off can be a serious problem but the BSA spreading mis-information and unsupportable assertions as if they are fact does nothing to make people believe that they are anything other than a bunch of self-serving scaremongerers.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
Good point, but...
You're off by an order of magnitude on the wages for the workers. Either they have to make $1,300 each, or the total has to be $6,500,000,000, in which case the executive bonus budget won't buy full-time attention from a single inbred asshat (sorry! typo - I meant "talented leader").
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Of course, when you take a pastry from the bakery, in your hypothetical scenario, they are deprived of that pastry. If they have 100 pastries, and 99 get stolen, they have only one left to sell. The above analogy was far better, in that, just as with any type of copying, by cooking your own you are making copies of the pastry without depriving the bakery of the originals, even if it is a flawless copy of the bakery's recipe.
I'm sure the bakery would rather you not do that, or that it be illegal to get pastries in any way but buying from them. But that doesn't mean they should be able to prevent you from doing so, if you have the technical skill to make a perfect copy of their pastries without taking any from them.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
"Not even the embedded software in your life support device?"
Which we all know is rabidly pirated all over the world, yessss
Granted. Perhaps they should make those available as torrents so they can cut their losses.
For a car analogy, NoSQL reminds me of people who take a reciprocating saw to a car, removing all airbags and safety systems, all but one disk for brakes, cutting the roof, trunk, and doors off, then saying that their vehicle is far faster than anything else on the track, comparing their vehicle to factory stock models with all their safety systems intact.
There is a reason why SQL-based RDBMS servers are slower than NoSQL. And that is because they ensure that the data is consistent and not lost/corrupted if two things access an entry at the same time.
Eventual consistency is a nice concept. However, it assumes that a tablespace will quiesce sometime. And a lot of these databases are hit 24/7, so there is never a time that the entries (can't call them transactions) that are in flight actually are assured that they are written to disk. Of course, a failure or unexpected shutdown can happen anytime, and entries in flight that can't be considered completed, or be able to be rolled back are corrupt entries which require time to find and fix, assuming they can be detected.
If I value the integrity of data stored in a database, I'm going to use an RDBMS that is designed and built from the ground up on tried and true concepts (ACID mainly). Even if it means that it would cost more than a NoSQL solution.