BSA explains its ethos
Published: 03 Aug 2004 14:45 BST
Yet I've heard allegations from some IT buyers of Microsoft salespeople using the threat of a BSA audit to get customers to upgrade.
We take very seriously what we're doing here. It's a good thing to keep in mind that our companies are not in the business of anti-piracy. They're in the business of developing software packages and marketing them to the public. They're not interested in going after companies. If they could, they'd fire me tomorrow and hire another programmer. The notion we're doing enforcement for anything other than to promote compliance is just false.
You've come under some criticism for the allegedly inflated figures in your latest piracy survey. What's your response?
Once again, people are trying to create something that's not there. We've been doing this study for at least 10 years, and the only thing that's different about the study this year is that it's more comprehensive. In the past, we've omitted certain categories, such as consumer software like reference and entertainment. Operating systems have never been included in the past. And we haven't looked as closely as we did this year at global software -- products created and bought to market outside the United States.
This year's study is really just a continuation and extension of what we've done in the past, with a bigger base. The conclusions are pretty consistent. The piracy rate we announced this year doesn't vary significantly from the piracy rate we've announced in the past. Naturally, because you're looking at a bigger market, you come up with a higher figure for lost revenue.
But some people have a problem with the apparent assumption that every pirated copy of a program is a lost sale.
I think the methodology behind the study is very sound. I haven't seen where anyone's pointed out anything about the methodology they disagree with. Many people don't like the number for one reason or another.
The notion that not every pirated copy represents a lost sale seems to be a correct one; I don't think anyone in our industry has ever argued it does. But I'd say when you look at piracy generally, it's far more likely that a pirated copy of business productivity package represents a lost sale than it would with other types of digital works. It stands to reason that a company that makes more copies of a program on company PCs than they have licenses to support them would purchase most if not all of those programs if they weren't copying them illegally.
There's a fairly close to one-to-one correspondence between workplace copying and lost sales, as opposed to say downloading music files from the Internet. You have to understand that the majority of the problem for this industry is concentrated in the workplace. And most companies that are copying business software are using it to run their businesses. To say that's not lost revenue -- I don't know.
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