Software piracy losses double

Study says 92 percent of software in Vietnam and China is pirated. Trade group blames peer-to-peer networks for problem.

The story "Software piracy losses double" published July 7, 2004 at 5:57 AM is no longer available on CNET News.

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College Hubs

A good starting point will be dorms in campus which I believe is the hub of illegal software?s, mp3s, movies, etc. May be computing departments in colleges need to crack on such activities. But the question to answer is why they are not doing it?

[unknown unknown]

Reply

Because they have other concerns, like patching Microsofts flawed software. Besides the latest versions of P2P clients have encryption and other features that make identification of an illegal swap very hard, and most allow the user to set the port. Besides colleges aren't inclined to act unless they recieve a notice about a specific user.

Actually, its much much much higher

I wrote a simple program in BASICA and tried to sell it for $10,000,000,000. Nobody bought it, BUT, I accidentally left it posted to the internet. Somebody downloaded it without asking and without a license. So there's at least ten trillion in piracy right there.

These numbers are totally fraudulent

While I'm not standing up saying that unauthorized reproduction is necessarily right, the numbers given for losses are quite possibly blown way out of proportion to what reality would dictate. Here are some reasons why.

1. The numbers given for piracy losses presume that every single copy that was duplicated would have been a purchased copy made at the full list price. With the typical deep discounts that software packages sell for over list, this makes the piracy 'loss amount' numbers look much higher than they actually are as many who pirate software would either use something else or not use the program at all if they could not. When a single copy of a program costs the equivalent of ten times what the computer is worth - if it wasn't, say, donated equipment - and about a month or two of your entire income, there is no way you can afford to pay full list price and you would not have. Yet the industry would claim that they have 'lost' the net retail purchase price to this party's failure to purchase their product.

2. These numbers imply there was an actual cash loss to the producing company, like software stolen from a store. These are non-sales, where the company doesn't sell a product to someone because they pirated the product. Since the company has no idea who is using that copy, the number is an estimate, a guess based on their imagination of how much they think the sale would have been, presumed on a full-list price retail sale.
3. Are these losses being reduced by the amount of money each reproduced copy would have cost to make? If the product sells for, say, $425.00 and the materials such as the CD, box, manual, shipping and handling cost $25, then the alleged 'loss' is $400, not $425 since they didn't spend the money to reproduce that package that was never sold. And, of course, this again presumes a full-list-price sale did not take place.

[Rahn_B]

Is it in the BSA interests to make it look bad

Has it occured to anyone that it might be in the interests of the BSA to make this figure look really high? How could anyone know for sure what the actual loss is? Estimate? Who's estimate?
It's like the figures you hear about the losses of the music industry due to piracy. Maybe it's easier to blame a drop in sales on piracy instead of lost interest by the public in an over priced uninteresting products.
I'm not naive enough to believe there isn't a lot of piracy going on but I'm also not naive enough to believe sales would go up, without piracy, by the amounts quoted from the software/music industries.

[rpmyers1]

The missing numbers...

It's dropped to 36% from 39% and 40% the year before that.

*AND* the definition of "pirated software" has widened, so the drop is even more significant