Thursday, 17 May 2007

Piracy Down Just 1% Losses Stands at USD 40 B

Piracy seems to be the ghost in the software industry that many want to get rid off. A new study has shown that 35 per cent of the software installed in 2006 on personal computers globally has been pirated. This leads up to an estimated USD 40 billion in losses...

Piracy seems to be the ghost in the software industry that many want to get rid off. A new study has shown that 35 per cent of the software installed in 2006 on personal computers globally has been pirated. This leads up to an estimated USD 40 billion in losses.

China was the hotbed of rampant piracy, however the country has seen a ten per cent reduction this year alone. This has not happened inj China in the past three years. These results are drived by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) study conducted independently by IDC.

"These significant losses translate into negative impacts on IT industry employment, revenues, and financial resources available for future innovation and the development of new technologies," said BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman.

"Considering the vast PC growth taking place in the Chinese IT market, this continued decline in China's software piracy rate is quite promising," said Holleyman.

India BSA Chair Sanjay Gupta said, "A drop of one per cent in the piracy level in India this year is definitely encouraging, however, the drop rate is low compared to the reductions achieved by China and Russia. Hence, we need to channelise our energies to reduce losses due to software piracy."