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Pirate software use declines
Are businesses getting more honest?

By Reuters

Published: Tuesday 03 June 2003

Corporations have cracked down on pirated software last year, trimming the glut by a percentage point, an industry report says.

The rare bit of good news comes at a tough time for software and media conglomerates. They are battling to stem the black market trade of cut-rate or free software, music and movie copies available online and on the street.

Industry lobby group Business Software Alliance (BSA) said on Tuesday the worldwide software piracy rate fell last year to 39 per cent from 40 per cent.

"We're pleased with the results, but we're still facing a piracy situation where nearly four in ten pieces of business software is used without authorisation," said Beth Scott, BSA vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The BSA has spent huge sums to try to reduce the installing of unlicensed software duplicates in areas such as word processing and spreadsheet programmes to avoid paying the license fees.

The modest improvement brings to an end two straight years of piracy escalation. The industry had blamed the burgeoning traffic in copyright-protected materials on Internet file-sharing networks and on so-called "warez" trading sites for the recent upsurge in unlicensed software duplicates.

The 2002 figure is 10 percentage points below the 1994 level, the point at which the industry first confronted the problem in a united front, suggesting the group's anti-piracy lobbying and education initiatives are showing results.

The group warned its fight was not over as it estimated piracy cost the industry $13bn in lost sales, $2bn more than in 2001.

The group added that weakness in the dollar contributed greatly to the inflated monetary value, and thus, it chose to single out volume of unlicensed software as the clearest indication for piracy.

The world's largest software markets, North America and Western Europe, continued to have the lowest piracy rates. Between 1994 and 2002, the US piracy rate dropped to 24 per cent from 32 per cent and in Western Europe to 35 per cent from 52 per cent.

By contrast, Eastern European nations, including Russia and Ukraine, plus the Asia Pacific region, led by China and Vietnam, are the big culprits, with piracy rates at 90 percent or higher last year.

The BSA has also pressured governments to bolster piracy enforcement and laws with limited success.

For example, the EU's Copyright Directive, a law requiring European Internet service providers to more actively police their networks to shut down piracy activities, has stalled on the state level. Thirteen of the 15 member states have yet to ratify it six months after the passing of the deadline.

The BSA counts Microsoft, Apple and Intel among its 22 members.