The Business Software Alliance released its 2008 Piracy Study last week. This study reports on global software piracy trends for the past year. Overall, the global software piracy rate rose to 41 percent in 2008, up from 38 percent in 2007.
This is the 6th annual Piracy Study conducted by the BSA. They are the largest IT industry group in the world, with programs in over 80 countries. The BSA is the voice of the software industry when it comes to intellectual property policies and law enforcement regulations. Increasingly, their focus has been the rising rate of software piracy in emerging markets around the globe. They specialize in software piracy education and software piracy investigations.
The new 2008 Piracy Study finds that global software piracy dropped in about half of the 110 countries in the study. Just 16 countries saw an increase in illegal software, but they saw such large increases that the global rate of software piracy rose for the second year in a row to 41 percent. The estimated retail value of losses from unlicensed software rose to $50.2 billion, excluding the effect of exchange rates.
The highest piracy rates are found in Georgia, Bangladesh, Armenia, and Zimbabwe, all with over a 90% piracy rate. The lowest levels are found in the United States, Japan, Luxembourg, and New Zealand, all with rates close to 20%.
The report by the BSA sites a few factors that helped reduce piracy in 57 countries around the world. One of the most notable is the changing distribution model of software, which now emphasizes free trial software and open-source versions that encourage buying fully licensed versions. They also mentioned the upcoming shift to software as a service (SaaS) that requires access to software via the Internet instead of on a local computer. This trend will allow software companies to better control the licensing and acquisition of their products in the future.
What all of these numbers boil down to is the economic impact of software piracy. This study says that for every $100 of legitimate software sold, another $69 was copied illegally. This not only hurts the software manufacturers, but the software vendors, the IT industry as a whole, and government tax revenues. Legitimate software vendors are often stifled by competition from illegal software, which is available for free or at a greatly reduced price. The IT industry gains jobs and revenue from servicing and installing legal software, and widespread software piracy can actually diminish the number of available IT jobs. China actually attributes 220,000 new technology jobs since 2003 to their decreasing rate of software piracy.
It’s easy to say that these dollar loses attributed to illegal software are not real since users would simply go without the software if illegal copies were not available. However, the 2008 Piracy Study makes the argument that a falling piracy rate creates a positive market change which causes software vendors to increase their investments in that market. This lowers software prices on the whole, which actually increases the legal software market share even further. They claim that this correlation between lower piracy rates and a higher software industry strength proves that the dollar values placed on illegal software loses are in fact real.
The study also makes a special note about current global economic crisis. The BSA claims that were are only seeing the beginning of decreased consumer and business spending on software. They claim that 2009 will see even larger increases in software piracy due to economic reasons, but they also stressed that cost is one of many factors that drives piracy rates.
For more information on this interesting market data relating to software piracy, see the complete 2008 Global Software Piracy Study by BSA and IDC.
1 comment
isurlis says:
January 24, 2012 at 1:33 am (UTC -7 )
in other words…. IT’S PACMAN!