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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.
Clearly we can only take such outlandish claims with the utmost sincerity. So what's up, software pirates? Why are you holding us back? The burden of proof is on you to disprove any of the aforementioned claims. Until you do they are all true because the BSA said so.
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
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 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!
And don't forget all those communists running linux! The bastards!
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."
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, it shouldn't have to be said, but it winds me up
When software is pirated, it is not permanently depriving the original owner of the item.
In the UK - "A person shall be guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it." - Theft Act 1968
I'm not educated in such matters but it seems that the US and other countries take a similar view
(Right, I can breathe again)
That's like 50 licenses for Adobe Creative Suite 5!
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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?
I dream of a day when piracy is gone. When software vendors, content publishers, authors, etc are free to lock their product down to the point where it cannot be used. I dream this dream, you see, because once we rid our society of time wasting movies and television, brain-rotting terrible music, and fucked-up insecure software, we as a species might actually be able to do something useful with our existences.
So, please, BSA, MPAA, RIAA, etc. Bring it on. Make your product so locked down no one wants it. Protect your intellectual property to the point where it has no value. Die, so concepts and ideas can flow freely again.
F/OSS will move on, creating product that benefits its users rather than its shareholders, unencumbered with having to fight off patent assholes every 5 minutes who contribute nothing and demand everything. Musicians will still play music. Artists will still create art for its own sake. And the rest of humanity might awaken from our slumber and decide to spend more of our time on useful pursuits.
If we spent 1/10 the effort on science and real life that we spend as a society debating who should have won American Idol, I'd have my goddamned flying car by now. And it would run on a free renewable energy source whose exhaust fumes would be oxygen and fresh-baked muffins.
Please, for the love of (insert_deity_here), RIAA, MPAA, BSA! We're counting on you! Redouble your efforts to make your entire industries irrelevant! Get out of the way so we can evolve as a species!
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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")
Hmmm... Windows 7 Ultimate Full Retail is only $285, Home Premium Full Retail is $185, and only $99 for Home Premium OEM (which anyone can install same as any other copy) (newegg.com)
Your MS Office prices are also equally as skewed, as it starts at $119 for MS Office (Home and Student) and $235 for Business. All full retail copies.
You missed the:
"At $200 avg, it's 255 million copies... and so on."
At an average of $300 it's 170 million copies - and so on.
Especially because per Microsoft's figures (if 2009's are anything like last years) a very large portion (over 60% I think) of the piracy is for Windows and Office. You can find those claims here on slashdot and elsewhere... what you would need to do is look at the BSA figures for 2008, and compare them to Microsoft's figures for 2008 to come up with the percentage.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Ah, yes, I left a zero off that number. My bad. I shall now precede to bang my head against the keyboard until bloody.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
I am going to be a devil's advocate here:
Lets say someone comes out with a 100% secure DRM. A theory could be that ACTA mandates a Fritz/Clipper like chip in every computer sold that locks software to machines, or the main OS of all computers is put under a hypervisor like the non-updated PS3s with the "Other OS" feature, with a remote kill switch that frys the machine if it thinks there there is any tampering.
What will happen? One of five things:
People would find substitutes. Developers will work on an open source solution en masse, and the software battle would shift from licensing and DRM to patent enforcement. Here, bigger companies might get behind a product so it isn't this easy one-way battle companies have with no opposition that they do with copyrights. For example, GIMP would get donations and developers. Patent enforcement is harder to enforce than copyrights, and the whack-a-mole war would begin with a program that gets slightly modified and renamed. A utility that is a clone of a commercial product may get sued out of oblivion, but if it were open source, each fork of it would have to be sued, and all it would take would be one single developer to perform a fork and call it a different name. And even though copyright infringement may be sued for millions of dollars, there are no cases of a patent violation for noncommercial use being sued into oblivion. So we would see programs spring up that are functionally identical to the commercial applications.
People will do without. If music programs got so expensive that average musicians couldn't afford them, people would go back to hardware mixers and discrete devices. People would write apps for Android and the iPad so the device can do basic music functions (loops, sampling, etc.)
The company turns into a niche vendor. The commercial product might still sell for unpurchasable prices, but only a few people in a narrow market would buy it. Yes, this would be lucrative for some businesses (AutoDesk is a good example), but there are other products which cannot thrive just on a narrow market segment. Adobe for example. If Acrobat was both rendered unpiratable and too expensive, then businesses would move wholesale to Microsoft's XPS, and print shops either install XPS to PDF converters, or they would lose out to the shops that do.
Of course, the worst thing is that this would do is create a digital divide. People who know how to use the commercial programs and who don't. In IT, this used to be common when Solaris was commercial. You would get people with Linux experience, but without the experience of Solaris/AIX/IRIX/HP-UX directly, they were always on the bottom of the list compared to someone who managed to get in a high end rendering lab and learn the basics of these operating systems.
The extreme worst case is that the commercial products be considered as premium/luxury brands, and are bought for status. If someone has a copy of a full version of a commercial application, it is considered far more stylish than any competition.
History has already shown us examples of what happens when too much DRM happens. Competitors who don't do copy-protection start coming in and grabbing large pieces of the pie. Lotus 1-2-3 got bit by this. Novell also got hit by this when people could install Windows NT, set up their domains and filesharing without having to worry about the hair-pulling license keys that Netware 3.x and 4.x had. Need more users to share files in NT Server? Just increment the number, but make sure to have a filed receipt of the CALs used, so when the BSA comes for an audit, you can show that you are authorized to use the amount of licenses.
Of course the exception to this are games, but its because people are used to games being locked down. Console DRM is almost bulletproof (XBox 360s are moddable, but get kicked off XBL left and right, PS3s are effectively uncrackable (yes, they got cracked for a little bit of time but Sony didn't just patch the crack out, but also locked
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.