{"id":10099,"date":"2009-10-20T14:02:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-20T12:02:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-10-20T14:02:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-20T12:02:00","slug":"sa-bangs-piracy-drum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/10099-sa-bangs-piracy-drum.html","title":{"rendered":"SA bangs piracy drum"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is at it again. Earlier this month the body, set up to protect the interests of proprietary software vendors, announced in a new report<\/a> that “roughly 41% of all software installed on personal computers is obtained illegally”. In other words, pirated. It then went on to say that the net effect of this was that proprietary software vendors were more than<\/p>\n

US$53 million out of pocket and that consumers were exposing themselves to malware by pirating software.<\/p>\n

Millions of dollars lost<\/strong><\/p>\n

Piracy is by no means laudable but the BSA has a tendency to hyperbole when it comes to its regular anti-piracy missives. For a start, the US$53 million. No doubt software companies have lost out on sales because of piracy, but stretching this to US$53 million, the retail value of estimated pirated copies of software, is optimistic accounting.<\/p>\n

The underlying assumption in this figure is that if piracy was somehow eradicated overnight, each and every person with a piece of illegal software would rush out and buy a legitimate copy. Clearly this is not going to happen.<\/p>\n

Most users will simply do without the software or switch to something more affordable or even open source. A huge part of the problem with software is that it is expensive and most users just can’t afford the price tag. Having a pirated copy is nice but not nice enough to convince them to hand over thousands of rands to buy a legitimate copy.<\/p>\n

It is the same in the music industry. Just because a teenager has a couple of thousand songs with dubious origins on their MP3 player does not mean that they are in the position to buy all the music legitimately. So instead of paying thousands over to the music industry they will simply do without when put under pressure.<\/p>\n

An earlier report from the BSA<\/a> suggested that software piracy in Africa was at its worst in economically-challenged Zimbabwe with as much as 92% of software in that country believed to be pirated. Compare this with South Africa at around 35% and the US at under 20%. Could the price of software be a factor in the levels of software piracy? It certainly looks like it.<\/p>\n

Malware<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other claim made by the BSA is that the prevalence of malware increased in countries where piracy is high. “Globally, there is significant evidence to link software piracy with the frequency of malware attacks.<\/p>\n

While this correlation has not been measured with precision, the evidence from industry sources suggests that markets with high software piracy rates also have a tendency to experience high rates of malware infection.”<\/p>\n

On the one hand the BSA is not completely wrong. A user with pirated software is unlikely (or unable) to apply legitimate patches to their software, which makes them susceptible to various malware attacks.<\/p>\n

Had the BSA left it at that it would have been palatable but instead it goes on to say that piracy-related websites are “rife with trojans and other security threats that are embedded in downloaded products or distributed through other means to infect visitor’s computers”. Certainly sites dedicated to piracy may not be the most wholesome sites around but this smacks of fear mongering.<\/p>\n

Open source<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the obvious shortcomings in the BSA’s approach is its consistent avoidance of discussing open source software. An increasing number of PC users are now using free and open source software such as OpenOffice and Firefox in place of proprietary, paid-for software.<\/p>\n

Whether the BSA actually takes this into account when it calculates the rate of piracy is not entirely clear. Although open source software is usually free and mostly downloaded from the Internet it is far from being pirated software. Instead free and open source software is legitimately licensed software that just happens to be free to share and copy.<\/p>\n

The BSA may be working to protect the interests of proprietary software but its sweeping generalizations, which paint everyone as a pirate, do little for the software industry as a whole.<\/p>\n

Piracy in SA<\/strong><\/a> – discussion<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Business Software Alliance says 41% of all software is pirated but draws the wrong conclusions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10099"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10099\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}