New Data from BSA/IDC Indicate Piracy Growth

BSA/IDC's latest annual report is out and stills shows large losses attributed piracy. I think they nailed it in terms of true root cause for this ,

"a rapid influx of new PC users in the consumer and small-business sectors, the increased availability of pirated software over the Internet, and difficult enforcement and education over sometimes sprawling geographies."

However, the steps they suggest for reducing piracy (i.e., education/awareness, WIPO treated) do not go far enough and do not limit the availability of software piracy. This will require a combination of software protection and licensing.

Vic

Comments

[Ryan Schefke]

How would you justify to a business that piracy is a problem? It's hard to quantify the impact don't you think? The market should have some way of measuring this down to the application/company-level outside of the high-level market loss. It seems that some companies welcome piracy more than they want to cannibalize it. Any thoughts on that?

[Vic]

Your right for certain software sectors it is difficult to quantify the revenue loss for software piracy. For others like PC gaming, they have it down to science and know that 90% of their revenues will occur within 4 weeks of the product launch because of the dynamics of piracy. For high value software vendors (i.e. CAD, medical devices, scientific tools) we have proposed a “time to crack” metric and model to help quantify the revenue loss to piracy (you can read more here http://www.vilabs.com/solutions/timetocrack.aspx).

These types of vendors are very concerned about the illegal use of their software products in emerging countries like China and Russia.

On your comment about companies who may welcome piracy, I believe this to be true of low dollar and high volume products. For example, Adobe may see the benefits of viral marketing that piracy provides with their $100 product , but would more concerned with their $2000 product.