Emerging economies are the driving forces behind the trend, the 2010 BSA Global Software Piracy Study finds, because that is where PC shipments are growing fastest.
Pirated software is escalating in value, even though a large majority of PC users around the world support intellectual property rights and prefer legal software to pirated software, according to surveys of approximately 15,000 PC users in 32 countries, conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs as part of BSA’s report.
“Pirated software is so easily available and distributed on the internet….People are able to go to Google, type in a particular product, and see a thousand references to websites” selling pirated software, said Victor DeMarines, vice president of products at V.i. Labs. The company’s Piracy Revenue Pipeline is a subset of the BSA estimates and measures real usage data aggregated from customers in high-value software markets.
Based on its data, V.i. Labs believes that the BSA study actually underestimates the level of pirated software. “One thing that the BSA report lacks is an understanding that there are so many other ways of getting access to this software and they are growing exponentially on the web”, DeMarines told Infosecurity.
V.i. Labs’s CodeArmor Intelligence product enables independent software vendors to monitor and detect when their software is pirated and to receive a report on the actual use of their intellectual property, DeMarines explained. "Through this data, we have been able to help out customers quantify the true issue and allow them to use that data” to determine their strategy for combating their loss of intellectual property, he added.
Based on data collected by the CodeArmor Intelligence product, V.i. Labs estimates that their customers alone will lose $4 billion in pirated software within the next three years.
At the global macro level, the BSA study uncovered a number of pirated software trends in emerging economies. For example, while the number of PCs shipped to emerging economies in 2010 accounted for more than 50% of the world total, paid software licenses in emerging economies accounted for less than 20% of global sales. Six years ago, the commercial value of pirated software in emerging economies accounted for less than one-third of the world total. Last year, at $32 billion, it accounted for more than half.
The global piracy rate for PC software was 42% in 2010. That is the second-highest global piracy rate BSA has found in the eight years it has been conducting its annual study. In 2009, the global rate was 43%.
Around the world, a majority of PC users see clear economic benefits from IP rights and protections: 59% think IP rights benefit local economies, while 61% think they create jobs. Eight PC users in 10 say they value legal software over pirated software because it is more reliable and secure.
The most common form of software piracy is buying a single license for a program and installing it on multiple computers: 60% incorrectly think this is legal at home, and 47% think it is legal at work (including 51% in emerging economies).