BSA IDC FUD 354
truthsearch writes "News.com.com is reporting that a 'study, commissioned by the BSA and conducted by IDC, found that in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors. The study, which examined 57 countries, predicted that a 10-point reduction in the rate of piracy over four years could generate 1.5 million jobs and $64 billion taxes worldwide.' The BSA, er... Microsoft, will use this study to convince governments to crack down on piracy. 'Overall, the countries that have the poorest record of IP rights have slower rates of IT growth,' BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said. Oh, and the countries with the most oppression have had the slowest IT growth, but that can't be the cause, nah."
Note to BSA: go fuck yourselves (Score:4, Insightful)
Basically they countered by stating they wanted full disclosure of
who reported them so as to determine the validity of the claim prior
to wasting internal resources and dollars. They also argued that
the reporting tools are a violation of privacy. Yes, they expected
them to place some software on their network which scans their
entire network not to mention each machine's registry. Third, they
also argued that even if they were in violation of license, the
license is between them and the vendor (after all, the license does
not allow for the BSA as having legal proxy interests) and unless
the vendor in questions decides that they'd like to personally
persue the issue, the BSA does not have legal authority or the
legal grounds to persue the action. Furthermore, they argued that
even if something odd was discovered and they lost, only the
government has the right to impose fines on legal matters as such
and they would be within their legal rights to simply purchase
any outstanding licenses or settle directly with the vendor in
question and completely dismiss the BSA altogether thereby
eliminating the need to pay any fines or added fees.
hah! (Score:2, Insightful)
Translated into english (Score:2, Insightful)
Countries should help us exploit our patents and trademarks to maintain monopoly. Our "unbiased" study confirms that this will help your economy.
Correlation vs. Causality (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the kind of thing that gives statistics a bad name.
Here's another correlation distortion. People in the mid 1800's had an average lifespan of what? 45 years? Today's average lifespan is like 70 or something. Now, choose your data sets that way, and compare life expectancy of those people who have personal computers, and those that didn't (those from the 1800's). You'll find a *strong* correlation between PC use and life expectancy.
But it's clearly meaningless. The key factor here is obviously availability of health care. You can use this same trick to "prove" relationship between almost anything.
This study is clearly junk.
I really wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
Causation and corelation are not the same thing.
Countries with a large IT industry tend to be highly developed, do not tend to have large organized crime, and tend to have stricter piracy laws. These all help keep piracy down.
This does not imply however that increasing piracy laws will increase the IT industry.
A=>B does not mean B=>A
It's like saying that countries with sea-access tend to have navy's, so if a country gets a navy it will have sea access.
It is a logical falicy.
Cause and Effect (Score:3, Insightful)
in general, nations with the lowest piracy rates had the largest IT sectors, as measured as a share of the countries' gross domestic product(GDP)
My take:
in general, nations with higher rates of piracy spend less of their GDP on software.
Gosh, what a suprise. I never would have guessed. I wonder what they'll think of next. I supose they'll tell us that people who buy cars instead of stealing them have larger "automotive spending sectors". Which isn't to say that copyright violations are OK. But to tell a country that sending more of their GDP overseas to the US will help their local IT economy is just a bunch of crap IMHO.
Funny Numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this?
A: Of all the software installed 40% is Warez
B: 40% of titles have been turned into Warez
I think that they mean A but I only find B to be believable.
Re:Ummm... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong! (Score:4, Insightful)
The only people piracy hurts is record companies, and I don't know about you, but I don't really care about the growth of record companies.
Re:Easy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Little addendum:
With the select few open source applications, this is dead on. Apache and FreeBSD are IT services that don't require elitist gurus, but try to get PHP + mod_perl + Apache with mod_ssl going, and you need that guru.
Great post, was brilliantly timed. I'm glad you didn't post this top level because it would have likely been taken out of context.
Re: Quoth the Simpsons: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lisa: "That's specious reasoning."
Homer: "Thanks, honey."
Lisa: "According to your logic, this rock keeps tigers away".
Homer: "Hmmm. How does it work?"
Lisa: "It doesn't."
Homer: "How so?"
Lisa: "It's just a rock. But I don't see a tiger, anywhere."
Homer: "Lisa," *pulls out wallet* "I want to buy your rock."
----------
Re:Exactly! (Score:2, Insightful)
People with IT jobs see piracy as stealing (Score:4, Insightful)
I think for people who don't think of software as work that puts bread on the table, software piracy feels less like stealing than it does for people who have had jobs writing software that paid their bills and bought food.
Logical fallacies abound (Score:5, Insightful)
This assumes everyone has a bunch of unspent capital lying around. That never happens. If people are not spending their money on software, they are spending it somewhere else in the economy. "Cracking down on piracy" doesn't generate any tax money -- those taxes are already being collected. The only thing that changes is the government forces money from other sectors into the software sector.
This is great news for Americans (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't say so in the article, but we're led to believe that the U.S.A. and other "Western" nations have strong IP rights, low piracy, and fat, healthy IT sectors. So that means there is no piracy problem in the U.S.! Whew! Thanks for clearing that up, BSA.
Re:Correlation vs. Causality (Score:3, Insightful)
Capital flight and trickle down economics (Score:2, Insightful)
The vast majority of software pirated by countries that the BSA cite as having small IT sectors is not domestically produced software. Thus, reducing piracy in these countries increases the revenue of coporations based in other countries (e.g. the US, and EU).
Software retail outlets and other industry "middlemen" in the countries in question will benefit from reduced piracy, but this is small potatoes compared to what BSA-affiliates stand to gain.
Thus, digital piracy in countries that are poor, or have small IT sectors, can be seen as sort of an international "trickle down" economic system. Such piracy provides software and entertainment to people who could not otherwise afford it, at the expense of corporations who, emperically speaking, can. Reducing piracy then becomes welfare "reform" for poor countries, more likely to hurt said countries' IT sectors than help them.
While end users are implied by the above paragraph, I would even include resellers of pirated software into this equation. As seedy as that business is, and as ignoble as the resellers' motives are, there's an undeniable Robin Hood component at work. Remember, these criminals reintroduce their ill-gotten wealth largely into their local economies.
Don't dismiss this as a romantic view of digital piracy; it's not. I mean only to provide much-needed devil's advocacy to the BSA's spurious horse hockey.
How interesting... (Score:2, Insightful)
A simple study would have shown them that often piracy generates more jobs in the piracy field than there were people involved in making the software/media.
But the BSA doesn't want you to know that, do they?
Observations on the study and it's implications (Score:3, Insightful)
Let us not forget that it was Steve Balmer who said software piracy was a key element of Microsoft's market penetration strategy (in 1994), where in developing countries, users would pirate Microsoft software - since they souldn't affort to license it anyway, then as their productivity rose through use of this high qwuality software, their revenues would grow and by the time the BSA got around to auditing them, they could afford to license the software they had previously pirated.
It's important to note that this has NOTHING to do with Intellectual Property Rights or Privacy but simply enforcement of contract law. IP rights - those that are defensable anyway - relate to issues such as term of copyright, the nature of fair use and the transition of protected works into the public domain. Nobody, as far as I know has ever questioned whether Microsoft owns the rights to it's products, or has exclusive rights to sell their own products (except in a few countries such as China).
As for Privacy, the only way software piracy in any way relates to privacy is in terms of the ability to conceal a crime. I can understand how reduced software piracy can improve an economy, especially if the countries studied had Gross National Products smaller than Microsoft's marketing budget, but the only way that a reduction in privaly could cause a reduction in software piracy is if Microsoft were allowed to prevent users from disabling such Windows features as the automatic license varification within Windows Media Player, or gather additional detailed system and software data as part of Windows Update (which it turns out Microsoft is already doing) or if companies were allowed to hack into the networks of suspected software pirates.
Nothing new here. We already knew that Microsoft wanted to prevent users from disabling the monitoring features that already exist in Windows Media Player and Windows XP, and we've already seen such organizations as the RIAA (in the case of the music industry) propose that they should be able to hack into computers owned by private citizens to confirm that they had not illegally optained copies of un-licenced IP. Overall, I think this was a horendously bad move on the part of the BSA (I still think the boyscouts should sue the business software alliance for use of the acronym, since it's clear that the latter has done serious and irreperable harm to the international perception of the acronym in any context), in that instead of making these findings public, they should have been used in support of a private lobying effort to ease privacy restrictions so Microsoft can look back at us through our computer screens and watch our every move.
-- George Orwell
Re:Biting the hand that feeds you (Score:2, Insightful)
Speaking as a profesional software developer, I really don't care about small scale piracy. I probably wouldn't have got into programming without a pirated copy of Turbo C++. In fact, it was my vast library of pirated software that got me interested in computers in the first place. If other people do the same, I can't criticise. If the cost of that is lower sales, then that's fair. Typically people will actually buy the software if they think it's worth it, even if a pirated copy is available. I'll make some effort to convince people to buy rather than pirate, but if they don't, then that's my failing, not theirs.
The other aspect is that it is limited to groups of friends. Someone has to buy the original. File sharing networks are more of a problem here, but for the time being, it's too inconvenient to get anything from them. Most people live too far away for a decent connection, and the majority of people download only.
Now, selling pirated software is another matter entirely. Then they actually start competing with me directly, and affecting my company's bottom line. Large scale pirates can and will run off sevceral thousand CDs, and often the buyers will believe that they are genuine. Then it becoems unfair competition.
Re:Easy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go ahead and RTFM, and see how long it takes you just based on the manual to set up what I listed.
China? Taiwan? Korea? (Score:2, Insightful)
They have large IT sector - and huge piracy.
The whole study is a cheat since the
piracy depends mostly on the relation between
salaries and software cost.
When you make $15 an hour - it is OK for you
to pay $100 for soft. When $100 is your monthly
salary - there is no way you can afford $100
soft.
Re:Logical fallacies abound (Score:3, Insightful)
You can either pirate that $300 Microsoft Office, then spend the money on the fruitstand down the street, or you can pay for it, and put $50 (or whatever) right into Bill's pocket. Nice way to get rid some capital lying around in a poor country...
Re:Oh that's great (Score:1, Insightful)
That is NOT going to happen. After the small businesses go under and unemployment progresses geometrically, the fall will accelerate far faster than things slipping into mere socialism. It'll head straight to dictatorship, with some regions of the country finally splitting off as competing dictators fight for their slice of the ruins.
This *always* happens with democracies that decide to vote themselves money. Only a matter of time. The best hope now is to hasten the fall, and try to get through the chaotic phase as quickly as possible and start rebuilding from basically scratch.
Re:Linux use hurtsd us economy (Score:3, Insightful)
So if I lived in some poor third world country, and happened to have just enough money to buy some legal, non-pirated, commercial software, imported from some big industrialized nation with a huge IT sector, then ... I couldn't spend that money on something else like feeding my children. Do these idiots at BSA think that when people don't spend money on something like software, that they end up just burning it as cooking fuel?
The reality is the cause and effect is the other way around. Piracy always exists, and it mostly exists among those who don't have much to lose if they get caught, or are sure they won't get caught, or just don't have the money to buy it in the first place. It's the existance of a strong IT sector that generates market for software, which in turn generates revenues for those who sell it (domestically or internationally).
The message BSA should be sending out is:
Businesses should have legal software (Score:2, Insightful)
In my humble opinion, the big issue is piracy in businesses. Businesses should be paying for their software, as they have the capital to do so. Some kid pirating Visual Studio to play with the development environments is not hurting the software industry -- they wouldn't buy it anyway if they couldn't pirate it, and they are actually helping by increasing dependancy on proprietary products. If the government starts cracking down on piracy due to studies like this, its going to be the fault of irresponsible business, not piracy in general.
Re:different reason [humor] (Score:3, Insightful)
logical correlation (Score:2, Insightful)
This relates to the "piracy cost us $xxx,xxx,xxx zillion"-argument: it is not true. Most people pirating music/software would not have bought the product if couldn't pirate it.
Who is Running the BSA? (Score:2, Insightful)
I was also surprised that that www.bsa.org isn't running IIS, but Apache on FreeBSD.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph?site=www.bsa.
Re:Exactly! (Score:5, Insightful)
The music/movie industry would have us believe that free distribution = end of profit.
They [bookcrossing.com] would seem to disagree:
"Publishers and authors: listen up! We know you may be concerned about all this book-sharing talk, and what it might do to your sales. You may be surprised to know that we have many, many publishers and authors that are big BookCrossing fans. They've seen the paradoxical value in encouraging the sharing of books. In fact, if one were to compare the number of people who buy books based on seeing book reviews here as the books change hands, to the number of people who actually find free books, we can assure you there are far more buyers than finders. This site is not about saving people money. Many of our members, in fact, have started purchasing two copies of every book they pick out, so they can keep one and release the other into the wild! Here's a good forum discussion re: authors, book sales, and bookcrossing that should alleviate any concerns about lost sales."
He [baen.com] would seem to disagree as well.
More here [baen.com].
True... none have anything to do with piracy, but it would appear that free does not necessitate loss.
Re:Logical fallacies abound (Score:2, Insightful)
It is not entirely clear to me how anyone can argue that: if people are interested in buying a pirated product at a certain price surely they would be interested in buying the same non-pirated product for the same price; that would give a higher volume to make up for the lower profit margin (yeah, yeah, yeah, only if taking into account marginal cost blah, blah, blah).
Nor it is not entirely clear what people mean when they speak of "jobs in the IT sector": programming aside -- and can someone please explain why e.g. Microsoft would hire more programmers merely because people stop buying pirated software: the idea with being a global software company is that you get to sell the same product everywhere, yes? -- surely many of the "goods and services" related to software would still be sold irrespective of whether pirated software was used: you still need a computer to install the thing for one; you might still use the services of a consultant; you probably still get the same productivity increase; you might even buy legal software to complement your illegal one(s).
Re:Easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
I challenge you to find anyone, hell find an MSCE, who doesn't have experience with Linux to install Apache, mod_perl, PHP, and mod_ssl in three hours.
The point wasn't that an experienced Linux user could do these things. It was that an inexperienced secretary could not do these things. Firing your IT staff and expecting people in your company to be able to RTFM and do things like install the above list of software?(we won't even go as far as using it) I don't think so.
Re:Oh that's great (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Easy... (Score:4, Insightful)
I challenge you to find anyone, hell find an MSCE, who doesn't have experience with Linux to install Apache, mod_perl, PHP, and mod_ssl in three hours.
And I challenge you to find a fry cook who can install IIS and Exchange set up for 1000+ users, and patch it properly.
Dumb shit (Score:1, Insightful)
Just goes to show that people could resort to using statistics in order to claim that the moon is made of green cheese if they thought enough people would buy it.
Smoke and Mirrors (Score:4, Insightful)
Same goes for this study. There is a correlation between national wealth and anti-piracy. However this doesn't prove cause and effect. In fact there are many other factors that can easily play into this correlation. Nations that are rich are able to pay for software legitimately. Nations that are rich have the most to lose if copyrights are not enforced.
Think back to the last century. The U.S., being the young developing nation it was back then, didn't bother respecting any intellectual property rights themselves. Works from Britain were stolen, no royalties were paid, and our government didn't care much either. Just go do a search on google for what Charles Dickens thought about the U.S. when we stole his books/works and paid him nothing for it.
Fact is, developing nations NEED some latitude in terms of copyrights. Without it how are they going to develop? People in some of these countries can't even make enough $ in a year to pay for a crappy copy of Windows. The U.S. went through the same thing, and yet now we're calling the kettle black. This is hypocricy.
Re:Wrong! (Score:3, Insightful)
>What's the point? I can create my own MP3s from CDs I already own.
Perhaps they lack the utilities (and/or knowledge of where to get said utilities) to rip the discs themselves. Perhaps the disc is physically damaged and no longer plays, or is damaged to the point that you don't want it in your 96x CD reader, which will spin it to pieces. Perhaps they seek access to the music on, say, a workstation with no drives, but enough oomph to run ogg123. Perhaps their bandwidth exceeds their CD-ripping capacity. Perhaps they get inconsistent results trying to rip the discs, and don't want to try six times to get one good copy. Perhaps the disc is DRM-o-rama.
Any more questions?
Re:Easy... (Score:2, Insightful)
My dad (hypothetical, since my actual dad is dead) could install RedHat or Mandrake or SuSE or some such distribution that comes with an adequate mail configuration for "typical" cases, and use it, same as an unskilled Windows user could with a comparable product. No, my dad couldn't configure a Unix MTA to properly handle several virtual domains on an intermittently-connected net, and I bet the typical nontechnical Windows user couldn't without consulting a Windows guru either.
Oh, wait. You said a mail reader. Sure, my (hypothetical) dad can configure a Unix mail reader adequately for his purposes, just as nontechnical Windows users can. Maybe not UCB Mail or MH, but then I'm sure there are high-learning-curve Windows mail readers out there too.
I have the impression the quality of MCSEs isn't as high as the quality of Unix admins overall, because I have the impression that lots of MCSEs study or are taught to the test. So I'd rather compare Unix admins who get a reasonable amount of respect to working Windows admins who get a reasonable amount of respect. And no, I certainly wouldn't claim that Windows admins are dumb and Unix admins are smart. I'm a Unix admin; my officemate is a Windows admin. He definitely deals with problems that are just as challenging and just as interesting (to him, anyway) as the problems I deal with.
There are some cultural differences in general between experienced Unix admins and experienced Windows admins, though. Because Unix got its first mass-market footholds in science, engineering, and higher education, and Windows got its first mass-market footholds in more general-purpose uses, a disproportionate number of Unix admins come from research and academia (and the engineering industry). Doesn't mean they're smarter, just means they tend to have a different background and different expectations. (Actually, that could help explain some of the rep Unix admins have for being elitist, come to think of it.) And I have a feeling that people tend to drift into Unix administration from programming, whereas Windows admins are less likely to have a programming background. And Windows used to have much poorer support for scripting/automating administration (I gather from my officemate that it's getting a lot better), which would mean that programming ability wasn't as helpful or rewarded in a Windows environment than in a Unix environment.
But my sense is that a good Windows admin has just as deep troubleshooting skills, just as sophisticated a mental model of the machine and the network, and just as much discipline as a good Unix admin.