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High IQ Countries Have Less Software Piracy, Research Finds (torrentfreak.com)
Ernesto Van der Sar, writing for TorrentFreak (edited and condensed): There are hundreds of reasons why people may turn to piracy. A financial motive is often mentioned, as well as lacking legal alternatives. A new study from a group of researchers now suggests that national intelligence can also be added to the list. In a rather straightforward analysis, the research examined the link between national IQ scores and local software piracy rates -- from data provided by the Business Software Alliance. They concluded that there's a trend indicating that countries with a higher IQ have lower software piracy rates.
In this context, at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.
... are more likely to use open source software.
Gee, considering the source, this couldn't be clumsy propaganda, could it?
The average IQ of the adults of any country is equal to 100. However, rich countries use a lot of software, the poor almost none.
Just got accepted into MENSA. Never paid for software in my life.
Correlations with soda vending machines as well.
They countries are mostly stupid people.
China
Russia
That is all.
Low IQ == Bad educational system == Third World == Low Income == Cannot affort to buy software legally
perhaps
One of the New Year's resolution he listed was, "Do not read the latest breakthrough experiment in psychology about, say, the effect of taking cold showers on grammatical ability. Better even read nothing about these 'experiments.'"
Don't count your chickens, BSA.
There are hundreds of reasons why people may turn to piracy.
Lust for gold, power or just born with a heart full of piracy.
People in high IQ countries are smart enough not to get caught.
Don't be confused.
This article is CIA disinformation 101.
As somebody already posted, High IQ People are more likely to use open source software. If you are downloading keygens and whatnot it means you are using Windows. Today it doesn't actually matter if you use cracked software because Windows is already spyware.
What are you going to do? Catch another spyware?
The end vision of piracy that people use their money to sponsor what they want created via kickstarters and the like is cool. In the short run, we'd gain trillions of dollars in the economy, the Internet would be a giant library, books for education could be free after digitization so education would be better, and a more educated and cultured populace are free to make better quality media. It goes against everything entrenched powers with IP stand for and the new Internet's goal to make money. Yet another reason it is cool. My generation's revolution was to start with Napster, but it fizzled out when they all got guilt tripped by people with loads of money.
Every summer ice cream sales go up. Every summer reported numbers of rapes go up.
Therefore ice cream must cause rape.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
> the researchers carried out robustness tests with various variables including the strength of IP enforcement, political factors, and economic development.
So they did take into account some factors like economic development, which makes this more interesting. However, why not analyze w.r.t. to the education levels of the area as well, since that would also affect the region's 'collective IQ' and probably indicate how many people are too poor to afford education, not to mention buying software. I searched the paper and 'education' as a search term only appeared twice, both times in references (so, its never mentioned in the actual text).
The researchers probably didn't consider the prevailing views of property rights or agreement with international treaties either. In some countries, its just more culturally acceptable to share software which makes it easier to average people to do so without feeling guilty. Other countries might have low income groups that are forced to buy licenses because their leadership got some incentives for IP treaties and are eager to show their enforcement to attract more FDI. Also, often countries with limited software exposure don't even know about good alternatives so its basically, either pirate or buy what everyone else uses.
'Cuz I trust a word that anyone from that organization says. Oh wait, not trust. The other thing.
Imagine all the people...
It doesn't surprise me that the Slashdot audience has forgotten who the Business Software Alliance is, but I'm a little shocked that TorrentFreak seems to have.
Breakfast served all day!
If it ever becomes necessary, I don't object to proving my innocence by IQ test.
The nations with more advanced childcare, more developed education system and economy, with higher rule of law and better average income pirate less. Who would have not though of that!? BSA of course, with their shameless efforts to insult and alienate entire nations in order to get them to avoid the products BSA members produce. Also, pancakes.
Was this based on surveys?
Maybe, Smarter people are more weary of offering up to random strangers things they are doing that could get them sued.
What about nations where Donald Trump is the GOP presidential candidate?
High IQ countries, in addition to having less piracy, are also more socialist. Buncha commie pinko leftists.
Vote TRUMP! AMERICA!
I see where you're coming from but the scouts aren't really that bad!
What about complex licenses where is it's easy to be listed as piracy due to not using the right ones or not following all of the very complex rules.
I suspect high-IQ countries are just so good at piracy that they make it look like somebody else did it.
-SR
Most content comes from "developed" nations because such nations have more entertainment consumers and people who can afford devices to play/run content. Therefore such nations have a vested interest in reinforcing intellectual property (IP). Piracy thus "hurts" the less-developed nations less, and therefore there is less incentive to enforce IP laws there.
Developed nations generally have higher average IQ's because they have better education systems and better average nutrition.
These two factors are likely unrelated. Correlation is not necessarily causation.
Table-ized A.I.
Research can say anything you want. For example... Lets say that those high "IQ" nations also most likely have the highest income levels. Meaning, another way to say this "research" shows that poorer nations pirate more software, which seems reasonable when you consider that these same people probably can't afford the software licenses and/or do not have companies that they work for that can actually buy the software. "Hackers" don't typically hack software because they are bad or low IQ people. They do it because most of the time they can't afford it otherwise.
Most IQ tests are biased towards one kind of thinking and one skill set. As more and more people are getting used to IQ tests people are scoring more and more. So they periodically "adjust" the mean score to get the number to 100 for the median of the population. For example former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was the first person to score a perfect 800 in a GMAT test [*]. If that very same test McNamara aced is given to current generation of students, about 10% would score 800.
It is called the Flynn Effect. High IQ countries and lower software piracy are correlated probably because the same underlying cause that creates Flynn Effect also reduces software piracy.
[*] The second person to score 800 is an 1983 IIT-m grad, one year senior to me, who got a personal letter from McNamara about it. That is how I know this nugget of info.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Wouldn't many pirates' actual country of origin be hidden by the VPN they are using? So their findings are skewed, and there's no way to tell by how much. But I'm guessing the folks who commissioned this "study" don't want to be showing that VPN is a viable pirate attack vector anyway.
is for video games, I would think. That's the real issue here, idiots staring at screens while twiddling buttons and yelling at bright images have lower IQs...
About saying country A has a higher IQ than country B.
IQ tests are country specific and are adjusted so that the results fit a specific Gaussian distribution. There is no such thing as a country with a higher IQ than another country. What kind of moron would believe this is for real?
Hail to "Idiocracy" creator of Beavis & Butt-head fame: Mike Judge! Heeeey! :-0
Country #1 in the world in economic freedom? Hong Kong. Country #1 in the world in IQ? Hong Kong.
Country #2 in the world in economic freedom? Singapore. Country #2 in the world in IQ? Singapore.
South Korea enjoys a higher IQ than North Korea.
Also compare the Han majority countries in order of economic freedom:
Highest of 4: Hong Kong 107
2nd of 4: Singapore 105
3rd of 4: Taiwan 104
4th of 4: China 101
There is a nearly perfect correlation between US spending on science and suicides by hanging/strangulation/suffocation.
Seriously, this is just a taunting and a very bad one to say the least.
Just read the 29 pages of this "study", I just flipped it through and laughed.
If someone would have looked at the data supporting this conclusion, one would say that even a six year old that is taught how to "insert a trend line" into excel could come up with this conclusion.
Ohh yeah, but there is a correlation matrix .. (*laughter*)
Another conclusion that could be drawn (or painted) based on this data, is that people of colour are dumb, which is an outrages conclusion.
However another conclusion that could also be drawn is that african countries where sufficient nutrition is not provided for the people leads to generally lower IQ scores, and less money leads to software piracy.
You cannot live of eating a floppy disc but of eating mangnoc.
Also the question is if a legal software trader is availiable, is not answered, this could explain the outlier South Africa, develloped infrastructure.
And there is the "british civil law" factor .. as statistical sound as the "americanized hamburger restaurant factor".
To give a picture:
A somewhat correlation is no proof, and only sometimes a hint.
Also all three authors are from business and management schools.
Btw. if you need three authors for these 29 pages and the 2 hrs. minitab than this correlates business schools and voodoo magic.
of the researchers correlate to what then? Their shoe size?
Me not want to be seen as stupid so me won't pirate software and show everybody that me smart.
bwahaha... Propaganda... play off one's ego to make them not do something that you do not want them to do
I'll keep downloading software for free while you do so.
We find things. We are smart.
I think.
So, let's pick a third world country: Romania *snigger*. And a first world country: the USA *snigger*. Romania pirates lots of USA software. The USA probably pirates very little Romanian software (cracked BitDefender anybody?). Average living standard in Romania is shit. Average living standard in the US is usually lot higher than in Romania even if you struggle (unless you're homeless, but I'm not 100% sure even then). Correlation with article: Romania has a much lower IQ than the USA. And it may even be true :) Stupid people correlate with stupid productivity levels, and the other way around.
Since when are we taking anything the BSA claims without a dump truck load of salt.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
They don't get caught because they are smarter.
There's no other viable explanation for this "story".
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
And this quote from the article:
“After controlling for the potential effect of outlier nations in the sample, software piracy rate declines by about 5.3 percentage points if national IQ increases by 10 points,”
Isn't that just saying: "We dismissed data points that didn't confirm our bias"?
Women with higher IQs have fewer (or often no) children. Have they just realized that being reduced to nothing more than breeding stock is for stupid people, or is it because they're busier and don't have the time?
Because they use linux ;).
It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.
Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they calmly rely on piracy data from those sources.
Then their explanatory variable: the so-called IQ measure. They cite the "seminal" work of Lyn,R. VanHaanen, T ()
Unfortunately for the authors of the latest "correlation paper", the work of Lyn and VanHaanen is anything but uncontroversial. I quote from one of the Lyn and VanHaanenpapers:
Just look at their graph. It's a big, uncorrelated smudge of dots - through which they have drawn a line and announced their conclusion. The data is worthless, the analysis is worthless.
Take a look at the publications for the first author:https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=lzywJN4AAAAJ&hl=en
Looks like a good part of his career consists of plotting various things against IQ in search of things that correlate. IQ is a dubious enough metric for intelligence already, and there's no possible way to determine a causal link from that sort of quest for interesting correlations.
It's a classic example of methodological incompetence. Got your popcorn? Let's start the show.
Their dependent variable is piracy rates (between 0 and 100) as published by the BSA. Not one word about measurement uncertainty in those data. Remember how the MPAA and the BSA used to estimate sales losses due to piracy? That's right: list_price x (penetration_fraction x population of PC's - license sold). I kid you not. And they calmly rely on piracy data from those sources.
Then their explanatory variable: the so-called IQ measure. They cite the "seminal" work of Lyn,R. VanHaanen, T ()
Unfortunately for the authors of the latest "correlation paper", the work of Lyn and VanHaanen is anything but uncontroversial. I quote from one of the Lyn and VanHaanenpapers:
Gettit? The fact that there are high correlations "proves" the validity of their inference that there are meaningful relationships. Did they go to Trump University or what?
In this vein I especially like the high correlation (see http://www.tylervigen.com/spur... ) between per-capita cheese consumption and people who died by becoming entangled in their bedsheets.
I wonder if the authors thought to control for that.
As far as serious research is concerned, this is the end of the line, but lets go on and have a look at their model, shall we?
They model the value of a fraction through a straightforward regression model: SP_i = \alpha + \beta IQ_i + \lambda X_i + \epsilon_i
Oops, and there we have the little matter of using straightforward regression to model a fraaaaction, instead of something like logistic regression. For those who don't immediately spot the problem, see e.g. here: http://www.theanalysisfactor.c...
Ordinary linear models are simply unsuitable to model fractions. A point that's common knowledge with statisticians, but one that's apparently lost on the authors (and the authors on which they base their work).
Right, lets continue and look at the graph they show with their regression line. Each country counts as one (China has the same weight as the e.g. Senegal and the US has the same weight as the Comores. Look ma, no weights! Sounds good eh? When you look at their graph, China shows up as one serious outlier with an "IQ" score of about 110 and a "piracy" score of about 80%. Only 1 bln people up there. Close by, in the bottom-right corner of their graph is the good ole US of A, weighing in at about 270 mln people, with almost the same score
that explains why piracy rates in the US are so high
There is nothing even remotely scientific about this.
Firstly the IQ test was originally developed by a French doctor in the late 1800's as a way of diagnosing mental retardation. It was never meant to be an intelligence test. It's a stupidity test.
Secondly for an IQ test to have any meaning it has to be conducted in a way that is culturally relevant to the place your doing the testing. So comparing IQ from people of 2 different cultures doesn't tell you a whole lot because the people crafting the test are going to design it in such a way to produce the bell curve for a culture that you would expect from standard distribution.
Thirdly this is just obvious bullshit on its face and can be torn apart with the most basic critical thinking. Like the fact that China is one of the biggest piracy hubs and there supposedly a high IQ country.
Or the fact that its generally more intellectually challenging to pirate something that it is to just go to a store and buy it.
I'd be willing to bet that this is a PR artifact funded by some lobby if the study even exists.
You can file this right along side the study "Scientists find correlation between penis size and paying your taxes on time."
People with high IQ will use Linux and doesn't need piracy!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
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Or more likely they just find/write Free Software.
To protect their money, they'll let the government invest in education now; albeit with a few tweaks directly in their favor.
Is this why they hire all those programmers from third world countries, because they have a lower IQ? Will you cut the cr.p, please?
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This is the message I'm reading
Those with high IQs do not refer to "copyright infringement" as "software piracy".
This is complete bullsh*t... Just like many eastern Asian countries, China's got one of the highest national IQ scores around the world; it still doesn't help.
I thought it was pretty much considered that being able to get stuff for 'relatively less' than what it would cost you is considered smart :^)
But maybe the other countries has street smarts, or a really high EQ?
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That is very bold suggestion.
Interesting part is - when people from countries with highest piracy rate move to let's say US and got paid real money , not peanuts and beads
1) their IQ is "good enough" to get job
2) they do not have to pirate so much
which only confirms bold statement from the article.
IQ tests tend to be culturally biased, so it would be interesting to know if the same tests are being used in both 'high IQ' and 'low IQ' countries.
If so, my guess would be that the IQ tests are (unintentionally) biased in favor of the culture of the 'high IQ' country or countries.
If not, then there would probably be no point in comparing the test results as the tests themselves are different.
Google 'IQ test cultural bias' for a bunch of links around this.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
In China, poor areas and those with noticeable mental problems are prevented from taking IQ tests. Additionally, schools decide which students can attend by using the IQ test result. This is causing many Chinese to put their sons and daughters to "IQ test prep schools" to get a better score.
So, this study shows that the average IQ of China should be far lower than reported and not that China is exception to the trend.
There is a direct correlation between software piracy and IQ, but not what people think it is. There are three classes of pirates:
Collectors (Addicts) - People who want everything, no matter how hard or rare it is, and will take a counterfeit or stolen version of something just because it exists. This is the modern version of the "Pirate" that is portrayed in fantasy/fictional media. They exist because they enjoy having things, even if they never use it. These people may have money, but they only see value in hoarding.
Distributors (Traffickers) - People who want everything that exists to be available for everyone to enjoy. Some of these people try to make money off of piracy (hence the piles of file-locker, and image-host type of sites in Russia that are laden with hundreds of malware-serving ads, or requests to pay for faster downloads), these are the sites that are in direct competition with itunes, amazon, etc. These people always have money but are generally greedy. In the 80's these were the BBS operators.
Pilferers (Dealers) - These are the people who actually spend the money to get the initial copy to pass on to the distributor. They don't really care who is financially harmed, especially if the content isn't licensed in their home country.
In addition, there are two other categories of "pirates" who aren't really pirates, just people who want to show off.
Hackers (Crackers) - These are the people who provide software, or do the actual cracking of software for Pilferers. They certainly know if their software or skill is being used for illegal means, but they don't care because they see a challenge. Some Hackers are also Pilferers themselves. The only "smart" people with a high IQ in the piracy wagon are here.
Script Kiddies (aka *chan sites users) - These people use the software created by Hackers without any actual knowledge of how it works. They are the people who create the demand for pirated material (mostly porn) by posting low-quality or broken rips, which in turn contaminate the distribution networks.
That leaves the actual consumers of pirated material, which BBS's, Usenet, and then Torrents. The average "torrent" user is not that smart and can't afford a VPN to hide their tracks.
Nations with higher IQ might know about cheap VPN options, thus, accessing content with an IP address of another country. Problem solved!
Nice psychology attack. sorry but I have a low IQ which means I am obligated to pirate more.
If the big software companies would just sell the older version for super cheap and without support, I'd surely stop pirating.
There is no reason that Windows 7/Adobe CS5/etc shouldn't sell for $50 nowadays. Surely any money is better than no money.
It's a curious trend to see "articles" from torrentfreak showing up on slashdot in recent months, and being treated like actual news.
That site is literally nothing more than a clickbait machine that doesn't produce any real journalism and never has, please stop feeding it.
Anything that comes from the Business Software Alliance can be assumed to be shite.