Software Piracy Costs Exceeds 50 Billion

A report was recently released by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and market research firm IDC that claims software companies have suffered “losses” of 50 billion. Highlights from the report summarized in an eweek.com article state the worldwide PC software piracy rate rose for the second consecutive year from 38 percent to 41 percent. The report explains this increase is due to the increase in PC shipments in countries such as China and India which are countries with high levels of piracy.

Another highlight of the report states the global recession will cause piracy to increase because consumers are more likely to hold on to their computers longer and they are more likely to install unlicensed software on older PCs. Predictably the global increase in Internet use is contributing to a increase in piracy and the IDC is projecting there will be 460 million new Internet users in emerging markets.

An interesting trend being seen is the popularity of low cost netbooks contributing to a decrease in piracy due to the fact they are often loaded with legitimate software and operating systems. The report also claims lowering global piracy by one point a year would add 20 billion in stimulus to the IT industry.

The report also states the lowest piracy levels are seen in first world nations such as the United States, Japan, and New Zealand while high piracy levels are seen in countries such as





  1. Joe

    $53 billion in pirated software = $53 billion in losses. HA! As if everybody running pirated proprietary software could and would pay full price if their only choices were paying for proprietary software or using an open source alternative for free.

    I sent a hacked version of Vista to a parallel universe. It will shortly be installed on 5 billion PCs. If I’m calculating losses correctly, Microsoft should be out of business by the end of the week.

    Reply · May. 14 2009 at 12:02 pm
  2. mountain_rage

    Without piracy you would simply have an increase in opensource software usage. There is very little the average consumer can’t do on a Linux machine than they can on a Windows machine. The one exception being gaming.

    Reply · May. 13 2009 at 11:48 am
  3. Carl

    You want to reduce piracy, lower the price of software. Why is piracy so rampant in 3rd world? No one can afford legit software. If you can buy MSOffice for $5 equiv, why buy at full price? For example, reduce MSOffice to $20 for student/home edition, and they would probably buy it legally to have the tech support. Or lower Vista (for example) to $40 for full version of Home Premier, and I bet their increased sales would offset the price drop. And before you bash Vista, if a game you want but couldn’t afford was $10 instead of $50, would you still pirate it?

    Reply · May. 13 2009 at 9:36 am
  4. bob

    You cant have losses on something not physically lost. Plus this is a speculation, you cannot possibly figure this out with out any physical evidence, which is impossible with anything digital.

    Reply · May. 13 2009 at 8:01 am

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