The Software Piracy Bluff

by

John C. Dvorak


    People still copy software, and
most of us who work for a living have
little sympathy for the plight of the
software vendor. After all, the
software industry will eventually
generate more millionaires than any
other business in history. Bill Gates,
with a net worth of $7 billion, is now
the richest man in
America, and his money was accumulated
from scratch - zero - in 15 years flat.
Meanwhile, the watchdog Software
Publishers
Association (SPA) and the Business
Software Alliance (BSA) claim that
whatever the software industry sells,
it loses at least 50% to pirates. They
keep changing the number, but they like
to say that if it's a $10-billion-a-
year industry, then another $10 billion
goes to pirates. In other words, Bill
Gates should be worth TWICE as much.

    Lets examine Gates' net worth. If
you made $5 million dollars a year (and
few people do) and put it under your
bed, it would take you 1,400 years to
achieve Gates' current net worth.
Here's another cute calculation: Forget
about interest. If you lived to be 70,
to achieve Bill Gates' current net
worth you'd have to make $100 million
(that's got eight 0s in it!) each year
from the day you were born until the
day you died. 

    At Microsoft there are something
like 100 millionaires (maybe more).
It's easy to go on and on about this.
Suffice it to say that the public is
not too thrilled with overnight
millionaires (or billionaires) who are
whining that they aren't making
enough money because the pirates are
ripping them off. To expect a sympathy
vote from the public is ludicrous. When
you consider the wealth of a Bill Gates
and how impossible it is to achieve
such wealth, you have to wonder who's
ripping off whom. While software serves
a useful robotic function, does it have
to cost so much? No way.

    Meanwhile, in a never-ending
attempt to coerce the world into paying
more money for software than is
practical, the BSA is now attacking
Germany. According to a news report:
"In a submission to the US Trade
Representative regarding allegedly
inadequate copyright protection, the
Business Software Alliance says
Germany leads its list of countries
causing the world software industry's
greatest revenue loss from
piracy....[With] 1990 losses of $1.86
billion, the BSA recommended Germany be
placed on the Priority Watch List by
the International Intellectual Property
Alliance. (The IIPA represents the
copyright industries of software,
motion pictures, music, and books.) The
BSA said next in line for concern are
Italy and Taiwan, where it
estimates total piracy losses in 1990
at $754 million and $753 million,
respectively."

    The question on my mind is: How
were these enormous figures for piracy
- $3.37 billion -  calculated? Out of
thin air, that's how. You guess how
many illegal copies might be made per
unit sold and then multiply that number
by the total legitimate sales in the
country.

    If copy protection were perfect,
would the extra monies be realized?
Unlikely. The fact is that most users,
instead of buying software that they
earlier copied, would use inexpensive
shareware or bargain replacements. In
fact, the software
industry would probably be sunk if
piracy were eliminated.
Prices would fall rapidly as market
share was gained by the cheap
alternatives until they dominated the
software market altogether. These
piracy loss figures are as bogus as a
$3 bill, and the software industry
knows it.

    The message that needs to be sent
to the software industry can only be
sent by the users of bootleg software.
Go legit and buy those inexpensive
shareware and PD alternatives. The
industry will stop whining about lost
revenues from piracy when we refuse to
play it's game.

[Note:  The opinions expressed above
are Mr. Dvorak's, and
cannot be assumed to be those of the
LameNESS staph or it's creditors. So
piss off!]

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