Software piracy has always been a problem. This isn’t exactly news. But this article makes an interesting point. While piracy is still rampant in the UK it’s actually on the decline in China and Russia. I have to admit that surprised me.
Emerging markets such as China, India and Russia saw single-digit drops in the percentage of illegal software installed on PCs between 2004 and 2005, according to new research from the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
However, the amount of illegal software installed on PCs was unchanged over the past year in the UK. Here 27 per cent of PC software is pirated and the BSA estimates this has led to $1.8bn in losses for software publishers.
Mind you this is based on numbers from the BSA. This is the same organization that accused a former company I worked for of hosting a warez server. We checked our network and even happened to have an external pen test scheduled for the week after they contacted us. Funny thing about that was the IP address in question, it did not exist.
[tags]Piracy, BSA, China, Russia, UK, Business Software Alliance[/tags]