Software
Piracy
Software piracy consists of hard piracy and
soft piracy – selling pirated software CDs on the open market versus
making multiple illegal copies of one software program and downloading
software over the internet. Another way to look at it is piracy
consists of large organized pirating industries as well as individual
consumer pirates. Here are some common questions:
- Is there a
difference between these groups?
- Should individual
pirates be pursued as harshly as large pirating operations?
- Is the businessman
who installs a single license program on both his desktop and laptop
as guilty as the person who installs multiple copies of Office on 15
desktop systems?
- Are kids who
download music as guilty as the businessman who duplicates business
software?
- Is a person who
download s a song title for which they already own the CD guilty of
piracy?
Hard statistics, facts and estimates
regarding software piracy are hard to find. The consensus seems to be
that software piracy costs the US about $10 billion per year. The
problem is that if is difficult to measure how many people would have
purchased that software if they could not download or duplicate it?
Surely not all pirated software represents a loss of revenue to the
vendors. In fact, a certain amount of software piracy actually fuels
software sales because users become proficient on those products and the
products then become entrenched in organizations.
A great deal of software piracy occurs
overseas where copies of Microsoft operating systems sell for as little
as $5.00. In some ways this piracy is helping Microsoft become more
entrenched throughout China. In other ways, this is thwarting Microsoft
sales in China. Ten years ago, Microsoft and organizations such as the
SPA appeared to be eager to pursue software pirates at all levels.
In 2002, pirate
music sales reached $4.6 billion globally. However the actual losses to
the recording industry are substantially greater as millions of people
have chosen to download pirated music rather than purchase the music.
The global music pirate market was estimated to have totaled 1.8 billion
units in 2002 – this represents a rise of 14% from 2001 and is more than
triple the 510 million units sold in 1999. The pirate cassette market
fell by over 20% as pirate discs continued to replace cassettes.
The global pirate
music market is bigger than any individual national legitimate music
market except for the USA and Japan. The following chart indicates the
Disc pressing capacity known to exist in various countries compared to
their known legitimate demand.
|
Territory |
Estimated Capacity:
all disc formats
(million units) |
Total Legitimate Demand:
all disc formats
(million units) |
|
Taiwan |
7600 |
230 |
|
Hong Kong |
2700 |
150 |
|
China |
2500 |
700 |
|
Malaysia |
1600 |
65 |
|
India |
800 |
160 |
|
Singapore |
720 |
73 |
|
Thailand |
500 |
53 |
|
Poland |
320 |
120 |
|
Russia |
300 |
70 |
|
Indonesia |
190 |
17 |
|
Czech Republic |
170 |
37 |
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