BSA IDC FUD

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."

Uh huh...

[Glock27]

'Overall, the countries that have the poorest record of IP rights have slower rates of IT growth,' BSA CEO Robert Holleyman said.

In related news, it was revealed that 20% of reckless drivers smoked marijuana. (Of course, so does 20% of the general population;).

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Truer words were never spoken...

Correlation == Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, it does! [umich.edu]

-*{War is Peace}*-

Oh that's great

[ShatteredDream]

Tell the greedy politicians that they get something out of doing their job, which is supposed to be enforcing the law. $64B in taxes? That's a **great** way to ensure that jack-booted thugs with M-16s, AK-47s, MP5s or Styr-Augs (depending on the PD) bust down as many doors as possible to make sure that $64B is protected. That's of course assuming that eliminating piracy won't damage or destroy other sectors of the economy. People, $64B is ~$24B more than we spend on the insane WoD. I know that will get spread over many countries, but that's still a damn big incentive even if it's only an extra $5B to the general fund.

Imagine Palladium getting mandated to make this possible. No Macintosh anymore or similar platforms. Probably no WordPerfect either as it will cost Corel too much to get certified. Linux? Bye bye SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, et al. It will be an industry dominated by a handful of giants. Our spineless, ignorant politicians have long ago forgotten that it is small and medium-sized business, not the giants, that run most of the economy. If those go under, unemployment will skyrocket, both parties will have egg on their faces and knowing America these days, we won't have a third party gaining power, we'll have 2 party weasles giving people heaping buckets full of Socialism.

Re:Might work...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonder if this will be the new add-on charge they throw at busted software pirates, similar to how they'll occasionally charge someone who was found with illegal drugs not only with the drug offense, but for failing to pay the excise taxes on the drugs.

OpenSource advocates should be happy about BSA

[vano2001]

Seriously. It is no secret that the great majority of Windows systems deployed all around the western (and the rest of the) world are pirate copies. There is no incentive for a specific company to switch to linux servers from windows servers when the linux solution will cost much more than the windows one.

Re:Easy...

[bmajik]

actually, you're dead on.

Open source software _is_ good for the IT industry. Broken software that requires babysitting by elitist gurus is _exactly_ what IT workers want, so they can continue to justify their positions and their salaries.

UNIX and Open source in general are _Great_ for the privileged few IT workers that use them effectively (or use them effectively enough to fool their employers).

Until companies start doing the hard analysis of "gosh, even though i sell shoes, IT is 50% of my expenditures. Maybe i should go back to the old way and cut my costs, after all, any 5.75/hr secretary can file papers and write order tickets"

Then IT industry will crash and the people that had cushy jobs because they were pseudo-wizards will get laid off, and companies will start using software that doesn't require wizards to run, and actually lets them focus on their business instead of their IT dept.

Not that any UNIX/internet companies have had trouble or layoffs recently, or anything ;)

Re:Ummm...

[jmv]

No, the point made by the BSA is that reduced piracy==profit. OSS is the best and easiest way to reduce piracy, hence it is good for the inductry. If you look at the OSS world, you'll also see that the countries that contribute the most to OSS are the ones with the biggest IT industry.

(BTW, I'm not saying that seriously, but just pushing the BSA statements a bit further)

The BSA - bunch of thugs

[Migraineman]

I started my own business recently. Not two weeks after I submitted the paperwork for a state business license, I received a mailing from the BSA that encouraged me to volunteer for an audit "just to make sure I didn't expose myself to the liability of unlicensed or improperly licensed software."

Uh huh. Riiiiiight. Seems that the state gub'ment sold a mailing list to these jackbooted thugs. You gimme any of that juris-my-diction crap, you can cram it up your ass.

Scary Part

[White Roses]

To me, the scariest part is the fact that most people in any sort of infulential position (C*O, Congresscritter, etc.) are more likely to respond to the fact that this report is printed on expensive/glossy paper and so therefore it must be true.

Worse yet is if the BSA presents it's findings over a complimentary lunch where they refuse to feed you until you've heard their propaganda, er, um, presentation.

If only I could print my proposals to use non-MS products in the latest issue of Dumbass Boss Monthly (this month's feature: Shiny Things As Business Strategy), I'd have no trouble. Graphs, documentation and logic seem to hold no weight.

Read The PDF

[jeffkjo1]

If you actually look at the white paper on the BSA's website here [bsa.org] [bsa.org] it becomes apparent that it is very unlikely to be used in the US. On page 8 is a graph showing corellation of piracy rates to revenue. The US has the lowest piracy rates of ANY nation that they studied. The US is also in the top 6 of revenue for the IT industry (coming in at 6.) Clearly there are other factors involved in the amount of revenue brought in and piracy rates. This study would be relevant to countries like Vietnam, Russia, and Taiwan, which recieve very little from IT tax revenues, and also have very high piracy rates. I don't have 100% faith in the US government, but I do believe that they can read simple graphs.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Objectives

[lildogie]

> This is the kind of thing that gives statistics a bad name.

I was discussing the value of using flaky numbers with a colleague the other day.

I made the point that people who use flaky numbers convincingly tend to get their way more often than people who fuss over accuracy.

So, whether you want to fuss over the quality of your numbers depends on your objective:
1) do you want to understand what is really happening, (eg. a scientist) , or
2) do you want to convince others to go along with you (eg. a politician).

Value judgements aside, what you ought to do depends on your objective.

Re:People with IT jobs see piracy as stealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people always bring up FOOD and EATING when it comes to copying software? If I didn't get paid writing software, I'd find another fucking job, long before I start hitting the ramen noodles.

But I *do* get paid to write software. I get paid for my time to write custom software that isn't distributed. I couldn't give two shits about "piracy". Just pay me according to the signed contract. No pay, no work.

Jebus, you'd think getting paid for each and every copy of something was some kind of God-given capitalistic right.

Must have a study of DRM economic losses

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we going to see a study of economic losses resulting directly from the implementation of DRM? Congress loves to fund studies -- we need bills not just to require proper CD-labeling, but also officially-sponsored studies of the bad consequences of DRM. EPIC et al. need to start pushing for or funding a study or two like this. I may be atypical (or maybe not), but I have foregone spending literally thousands of dollars over the years because of DRM. I haven't upgraded my VCRs, because the newer ones recognize Macrovision. I haven't yet bought a DVD player. I've never bought a DVD in my life. I have bought a grand total of 3 used CDs over the past 20 years that CDs have been available. I haven't upgraded my computer software at home, just so I can avoid the DRM being built into newer software. Just the very thought of DRM disgusts me and dissuades me from embracing new technologies. I don't have the time to find DRM workarounds, so I just stick with my 20-year old analog equipment. Surely there must be thousands of people like me, at an enormous cost to the economy. ANTI-"PIRACY" hurts the economy, too.

Re:Note to BSA: go fuck yourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

They purchased the outstanding licenses they needed. They are still in business. No fines were paid.

Re:Uh huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not [drugwatch.org] at [usdoj.gov] all [marijuana.com]. (that last link gives some alarming statistics about MSIE users)

He didn't give an accurate quote. You see, they don't consider alcohol a drug, so when they say "In a roadside study, one in three reckless drivers who were tested for drugs, tested positive for marijuana," [mediacampaign.org] they really mean "of the reckless drivers who were caught, 33% of those not drunk were stoned," which I figure works out to about 5% of the reckless drivers who were caught. I see lots of reckless drivers, and I never see any of them pulled over. Most of them are reckless because they're damn fools in a hurry, not because they're drunk or stoned.

So, apparantly a larger percentage of the population uses marijuana than is impared by marijuana while driving, which makes sense, because most of the smokers I know don't drive stoned. Unlike the drunks, they're smarter than that.

Re:Easy...

[Pinball Wizard]

Well, goody for you. But the only way you can install X's list in half an hour is that you know exactly what modules you need to have install before you even get to mod_perl, you know that you need a certain version of zlib before openssl will work, etc. etc. You need to know many trivial but irritating facts like these to get all the pieces working together.

The point he was trying to make was not how fast an expert can install something, it was, can a company that just fired their IT staff get a secretary and install it by reading the manual?

Even a skilled IT person who hasn't had lots of practice installing that exact combination of software on the specific platform before is going to have to know how to piece together several conflicting manuals, how-to's and newsgroup postings, and combine that with a fair amount of trial and error to get it right.

1/2 an hour my ass. Only if you have done it before several times on the same platform.

Re:Note to BSA: go fuck yourselves

[Tyreth]

Did they actually manage to avoid being audited? This study means that we draw the conclusion that pay-per-package software is inefficient, because a society can perform it's tasks with less people when it pirates. That means that opensource software is a more efficient solution, meaning that humans can spend their times working on more important things - like creating new software, technology, building warships, whatever. It just proves that the pay-per-package software model is obsolete and bad for a countries' productivity.