publicOSS

Reading about software and the software industry, I found BSA’s 2007 Piracy Study . On it, there is the following statement:

Local software industries can be crippled by competition from pirated software from abroad, and local services firms and channel players lose revenue while businesses waste time and money working with faulty and unsupported software. Coupled with lost tax revenues and slower job growth than a larger legitimate market would provide, software piracy has clear negative consequences for local economies.

(Business Software Alliance, 2007, p. 5)

First, I will say that piracy is a crime, and that I also believe that piracy has clear negative consequences for local economies. But, the reasons that the BSA document offers are kind of funny:

1. Local software companies cannot even think to get into the big software businesses: operative systems, office tools (text editor, spreadsheet, etc. ), data bases, and others. Therefore, I doubt you would not find a single “local” company reporting losses because of piracy (by local company, I mean a real local company, not the local division of a big software company).
2. Local services firms can still provide services even if the software was not bought legally (here I also mean the real local services, not the local division of the big software company). For that reason some businesses use illegal copies, because someone (anyone) can provide enough support to keep the business running. If that is not the case (specialized software or sensitive procedures), I am sure businesses pay for the license.
3. The tax revenue part is hard to calculate. How much money is getting into the Treasury? How much money is going back to the software company’s country? Give me the answers, and we can discuss this point.
4. Finally the job growth. I don’t know. For example, small companies that cannot afford legal software (really small companies) contribute to job growth. Therefore, this point is also open to a further analysis of the numbers.

The point where we agree is about the negative consequences for the economy. I think the negative impact has to do with the image of the country. High software piracy in a country can be an indicator of soft copyright laws or faulty enforcement of them. This image does not attract investors.

The corollary of this post is that BSA’s statement seems suitable to be used to make the FLOSS case.

Tags: Piracy

This entry was posted on September 15, 2008 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.