Slashdot Mirror
PC Software Piracy Decreases Worldwide, But Remains Rampant (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A new report published by The Software Alliance shows that usage of pirated PC software is decreasing worldwide. While this is a positive trend for the industry, piracy remains rampant in many countries. This includes Libya, where a massive 90 percent of all software is used without permission.
I bought legal copies of Windows 9 from ebay for all my machines, so I didn't have to pirate software. Just had to wait until they were shipped in from Hong Kong.
... are the tech industry, the videogame industry especially with the rise of the internet is basically making broken fraudulent/products and upping the corporate propaganda campaign to sell microtransactions and loot boxes and that requires basically stealing the software. Diablo 3, starcraft 2 and now even starcraft 1 with the latest patch now have drm in them - aka - the software you paid for now requires permission from another computer and violates your privacy at the same time.
No thanks the mass of tech illiterate idiots that came online high speed internet.
This is Slashdot so I'm waiting for all the "Piracy shouldn't be a crime... it's not theft... programmers should write code for us for free and not charge us for their work" comments.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If your software has switched to a DRM, always-online, subscription based model, the odds are I'll ignore it completely before I'll pirate it. And I'll pirate it before I buy it if I can't figure out:
A - What it is that your product does exactly
B - What specific licensing malarkey I need to do what I want
C - What the 67 different versions actually restrict me from doing
D - If the product even works as claimed, has decent support, gets updates, etc.
Actually I think it is because most software is hooked to the cloud. And we pay for service contract to use it monthly vs. having the software on your PC.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The most pirated software in the world, Windows, was given out for free for nearly two years. Of COURSE piracy drops when the price literally becomes zero.
I doubt very much that people will pirate games if the game is more a subscription service. The games with the real longevity are in 90s cartridges. Single player games seem to have disappeared. If you want a good game of chess, you'll probably "apt-cache search" or google for an online variant. Would anyone bother getting "battle chess" these days? I see it was remade in 2014, but requires Windows {xp,7,8}, so that's going to be a no from me, won't be looking any further.
Why UNIX?
Proud to be a pirate.
I love the way that they quote all these rates per country with zero uncertainties. If you actually read their report there is some attempt to explain their methodology for calculating the rates based on how many computers there are in a country, how many "software units" each computer should have installed and then how many "software units" were purchased. There is then estimation of the average price for each "unit", fraction of Open Source use etc. In fact, the whole process uses estimated values all over the place without ANY uncertainties quoted.
If you want anyone to take these numbers seriously there has to be some estimation of the uncertainty.
Don't know if this trend has anything to do with OSS, but it seems like almost every commercial software I buy, I get buyer's remorse. Between the license manager crap running in the background, affordable but handicapped versions of the software, or complete versions that require you to remortgage your house for a one year subscription....open source workalikes deliver way more for less.
"...piracy remains rampant in many countries. This includes Libya, where a massive 90 percent of all software is used without permission."
With a 90% piracy rate, I only have one question; why the hell do the other 10% even bother being legal? I mean seriously, it's rather obvious enforcement is on par with morals and ethics.
Countries that clearly don't give a shit about legal software probably shouldn't be counted in the piracy statistics. They're more of a constant fuck-you outlier.
Actually I think it is because most software is hooked to the cloud. And we pay for service contract to use it monthly vs. having the software on your PC.
Literally I've used software for 35+ years and have never used software "hooked to the cloud"
On the other hand I use all (ALL) open source software and have never pirated an open source software because that would be ridiculous.
I am OP and somebody modded my facts -1 but modded you +3. smfh.
Any type of service hooked to a cloud is used by people with more money than brains. Apple and Microsoft cloudwarez plus Google cloudwarez are lamewarez.
Warez will always be warez but who wants shitwarez. Open-source-world has much better software in general unless you're making a movie pretty much. This goes for database software, Linux backends, Linux frontends etc. Tell Jeff Bezos to download cloud-based IIS. smfh.
Bad job mods. This is why Slashdot is not an effect any more only an afterthought. Notice nobody gets their servers overloaded now? Cloudflare is not why either.
and who reads an 30+ page one.
Also MS has insane rules each HOST CORE in a VM cluster must be licensed for windows even if say you only need a few windows vm's and it's mostly Linux vm's.
When you get your customers killed, they stop buying. Get Thomas Watson Jr. to the White House and your promises to your customers are always allowed to be kept, even during a nuclear war.
With a 90% piracy rate, I only have one question;
are you stupid enough to believe this information? of course you are, idiot
If you look at pages 17 through 19 (inclusive, of the actual report), you'll find some very fine prose that the BSA use to describe the methodology they follow for determining the amount of unlicensed software.
... ... Respondents are asked how many software packages, and what type, were installed on their PC in the previous year; what percentage were new or upgrades; whether they came with the computers or not; and whether they were installed on a new computer or one acquired prior to 2017..."
It's utter garbage.
It's about as accurate as a weather forecast could be. It contains English-language "formulae" such as:-
Unlicensed Rate = Unlicensed Software Units / Total Software Units Installed
and Total Software Units Installed = #PCs Getting Software x Software Units per PC
Just look at that second formula for a moment. This is an approximation at best. But the absolute worst part of the report is the part in which the BSA explain how they get these numbers. This is, in fact, done for them by IDC. And here is the methodology:-
A key component of the BSA Global Software Survey is a global survey of more than 22,500 home and enterprise PC users, conducted by IDC in November 2017. The survey was conducted online or by phone in 32 markets that make up a globally representative sample of geographies, levels of IT sophistication and geographic and cultural diversity....
So let's just translate that.
1. This survey was based on evidence from a telephone survey.
2. People were called and asked to accurately remember what software had been installed on a computer in the preceding 12 months.
3. The result of a survey of 22,500 people was then extrapolated up to represent the entire world's software piracy problem.
We need to remember that this sort of document gets handed around the halls of government and shown to policy makers; the poor data samples, invalid questions, wild speculations, and sloppy calculations that form the heart of this paper then get used as the basis for legislation. Don't get me wrong - software piracy is wrong. With so much fabulous free and open source software available, there really is no excuse for it any more.
But it's important to remember that this sort of paper is going to be used to argue for ever-more Draconian laws which will restrict the freedoms of ordinary computer users. It's really important that documents like this get properly challenged and that legislators are left clearly understanding that this report belongs in the fiction section of the bookshop...
Microsoft and Dell no longer wants to sell me software for my Windows machines (they seem to like their lease model).
And I am not sure how one would pirate Linux...
Check your premises.
I agree.
As an example, Adobe Creative Suite was one product that was very expensive to buy, and all but begged piracy. Now you can try it for free and then pay a "modest" price to use it every month here-after. In the age of Netflix, Hulu, YouTube Red, Spotify, what's ONE MORE subscription being auto-charged to your favorite credit card?
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-05-17
According to this one random web site I chose from a Google search, Forrester Research estimated that there were in excess of two billion active PCs in the world by the end of 2015. That's more than 2 years ago.
This is probably an unfair calculation [though no less fair than the BSA's rubbish] but if you estimated that, on average, each person in the 22,500 survey pool had, say, 5 PCs [it was stated that this sample pool was a mix of personal and business users], then the number of people surveyed for this report amount to 0.005625% of the entire global population of PC users.
Five thousands of one percent.
Extrapolated up and used as the basis for a report from the BSA? If you were a scientist of any field that included the use of statistical analysis and you published a report based on a sample size of five thousands of one percent of the likely total pool, would you expect your analysis to be taken seriously?
I stopped buying and playing new PC video games over 6 years ago.
The last game I bought was Minecraft.
The last game I payed money to play was Boom Beach. When they turned up the monetization on Boom Beach to ridiculous levels, I quit playing that because it had reached "pay to win" levels.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
isn't most software is grossly over-priced, isn't greed on the part of the senior people in the industry to blame for the majority of software "piracy"? after all if software was truly affordable, even in the third world, most people wouldn't bother to look for the black market
Private citizens don't pay many subscription fees, because they sum up quickly. You can afford one or two subscriptions, but take a look at how much other software you're using. Many companies who tried monthly subscription fees went bankrupt, and the rest of them is still burning investment funding money. As an example, Cakewalk Sonar tried subscriptions and it went bad faster than even skeptics had predicted.
It's decreasing because software has massively shifted to a subscrition / cloud / SaaS style instead of one-off purchases.
You can't exactly pirate a subscription.
Or it's because the "must-have" software is decreasing.
I think the decline of software piracy has something to do with the fact that open source alternatives have matured quite a bit compared to where it was a decade ago. Open source software and Linux are becoming more viable for mainstream use, so the need to pirate commercial software is not as prevalent.
OTOH, look products like Windows 10. If I pirated software (which I don't, I believe that everyone has a right to be paid for their work), I wouldn't bother wasting precious bandwidth on downloading something as atrocious as that and I wouldn't waste time trying to circumvent activation. Products like that are as good as worthless. I didn't even take it when it was offered as a free upgrade to Windows 7 on my only machine that doesn't run Linux.
I'm sure some people are going to be lauding this up as a win for subscription based pricing.
Personally I'd say it's more likely because most of the major "must have" software suites haven't added anything new for years and people simply keep using the version they pirated years ago.
The last "new" feature to the Adobe suite I've paid any attention too is puppet warp, which google tells me was introduced in 2010. Coincidentally this is the same vintage as the copy of MS Office I'm running, using a disc and key I found in a skip after someone had a clear-out, and only because Open Office can occasionally be a fast and loose with the formatting. The Corel suite peaked with X7 (2014) and has been on the decline in terms of usability since, and Acrobat has gotten steadily worse since 9.
Even though Windows 10 is no longer free, it is still not the most pirated. Windows 7 torrents are at least twice as popular on pirate bay.
But, But, Linux!
In the age of Netflix, Hulu, YouTube Red, Spotify, what's ONE MORE subscription being auto-charged to your favorite credit card?
seriously? $10 here, $5 there.. it adds up.. quickly.
$50/mo. is not modest. It's equivalent to re-buying the entire suite every 3 years. I never upgraded that often prior to that forced change.
DRM is crackable, but can't-live-without-them features and required ongoing server validation sure have helped Adobe in this arena.
Funny enough, I just installed a Russian rooted Android 10.1 on my Chinese stereo in my German car. Never worked better!
Seriously. Look at the example they give: Libya.
Libya is literally a shit hole right now with open slave markets.
Is it any wonder people aren't paying for your bullshit software? I mean, do you seriously expect people to just say, well, I can't afford it.
Guess I will keep living in the third world and not use any computers.
Fuck no.
And they are perfectly right not to. Piracy is not an issue when it's being done by people who weren't going to pay for it anyway.
When I went to school in my shithole country we didn't have money for all those fancy school books.
You know what we did? We copied books from the 60 to 80s.
Gasp! That's copyright infringement. Fucking right it is. I don't care. I got an education out of it, and that is way more important than paying some idiot a fortune to keep republishing the same bullshit every year to fleece students.
I personally have almost eliminated my own 'piracy' of software because FOSS alternatives have really proliferated, improved, and become far easier to find in the last decade. In my experiance as a average Joe computeruser is that it used to be (on M$ windows at least) that FOSS alternatives to proprietary software was clunky as hell, spread by word of mouth, or were nonexistent. Whereas now many linux based operating systems are just as or more user friendly to laymen as windows. With some exceptions, it's pretty rare to find proprietary software that does not have a favoutable comperable (F)OSS counterpart even on windows.
A major exception to this being computer games. Not only is the majority of the game development ecosystem, from neophyte friendly game engines to AAA licenced engines and libraries, proprietary but the nature of the content of games as non-interchangable, digital products protected by copyright monopoly makes them uniquely situated for unauthorized copying (or "piracy"). I often find myself downloading old (10+ years) games without a licence, because even when I can lack of support, lack of any true ownership of the game even if I did have a licence, and lack of any real harms to those who contributed creatively I can't really see why I ought not to do so. Of course most people are "pirating" AAA games as their huge advertising budgets create strong but not loyal consumer demand. And as that's where the money is in the industry, and the AAA devs are the ones leadimg the charge in user unfriendliness with DRM, bloated file sizes, mandatory internet connection, crippled single player and local co-op, etc. Of course its fair that they protect the profitability of their products, but I for one am a little perturbed by the direction the industry is headed to squeeze the last drop of revenue from the minority who don't have a licence at the expense of those that do.
That said I will try not to get into arguments of right or wrong, nor argue that the market is wrong in what it will bear, but it seems rather silly to me to me the alarmist tone of the report, talking of " rampancy" or "alarming" levels of unlicensed software use, and claiming that there are tens of billions of dollars "lost" due to this. Given that such unlicenced software use occurs most in poverty racked nations, that copying binary data costs nearly nothing, and that those who do so most likely could not or would not buy most of the software they use without a licence, it's a rather odd claim. Oh well, no use complaining about standard industry advocate practices I guess.
Here is the plan about Libya
For most people $50/mo during the only month you need to use it is less than the limited life license.
Now, if you need to use every day (or a couple of times per month) for years, then the subscription is more expensive.
The US destroyed Libya and people are being enslaved there now, and you're complaining about software piracy? Where is your brain?
If it was PC games I can sort of understand, Windows OS to a point too but considering we are in the age of web services and open source and gluts of free applications, more than any in history including the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, what applications would be pirated?
Make SELinux enforcing again!
You re-release perfectly good games with new DRM and always on internet requirements.
You release a stripped down version of the game and sell the rest as DLC
You expect every title to be paid for again on every platform.
You abandon your hardware
You cut off the servers
You require extra sales funnel installations
You install spyware
You completely change games core mechanics with no notice.
You make up silly numbers and complain about piracy.
You take gamers to court
You charge monthly fees on top of full retail price.
You make micro-transactions mandatory.
You re-release and ruin classics.
Sorry, not sorry.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
When software scales to larger and larger installations the effort for complex lifecycle management can make a monthly subscription that keeps everyone on the latest released version for all licensed users look very attractive.
Which is fine - nobody said it was bad to offer it as an option.
These visualbasic monsters of proprietary software are going, and with them goes the "piracy".
I mean its the BSA, of course they have a history of exaggerated claims many of which have been covered here on Slashdot in the past. The shocking part is more that is is being covered as news on Slashdot instead of pointed out as absurd.
A combination of several factors, increased use of open source, increased use of cloud, increased use of mobile devices...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
How many applications did you use to have to download and run on your computer 35 years ago. vs. What you need to download now.
We had programs that checked your bank account via a modem. They were checkbook programs, tones of game we played once. Dictionaries, Encyclopedia... All on disk (Well CD (25 years ago)). Even if we were a avid BBS User, we would have a couple of Terminal Emulators, Software that would download message boards, so you can read it offline and sync them back when you get online again....
Most of this crap software we don't even download executable but access via the Web.
You have gone to the cloud and didn't even realize it. The fact that you are posting on Slashdot shows this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yeah, only Adobe CC ISN'T $10, or only if you just want Photoshop alone, and who does that. Want Illustrator too? Well. . . Illustrator alone is $20 a month or $239.88 for the whole year, prepaid. Not exactly peanuts. Thank you Adobe.
I'd rather go OS than pay a subscription but then I'm a casual user. Having my computer out of action due to viruses also has a cost for me nowadays, so that's pirated software out.