Study: software piracy on rise

13/05/2009

Central and Eastern Europe remained the region with the highest rate of software piracy in the world last year, a report released Tuesday showed.

(WSJ, AFP, Reuters, Xinhua, Sofia Echo, Novinite.bg, Mediafax, Business Software Alliance - 12/05/09)

Software piracy cost companies 38.8 billion euros -- an 11% increase over the previous year. [AFP]

The losses incurred by companies due to personal computer (PC) software piracy surpassed the 36.7 billion-euro mark last year, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) said in an annual report Tuesday (May 12th).

Despite some progress in curtailing the illegal use of PC software products, "the worldwide piracy rate went up from 38% in 2007 to 41% in 2008," according to the study conducted by IDC, a leading information intelligence company, for the BSA.

According to the report, piracy rates actually dropped or remained unchanged in 93 of the 110 countries surveyed.

BSA Vice-President Jeffrey Hardee attributed the overall increase to "the mathematical outcome of more rapid growth of PC markets in economies of higher piracy rates".

The monetary value of unlicenced software increased by more than 3.7 billion euros year on year, to an estimated 38.8 billion euros in 2008. "Excluding the effect of exchange rates, losses grew by 5%," the report added.

Despite a drop of two percentage points, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) remained the region with the highest piracy rate, at 66%. Next came Latin America, with 65% for a second year in a row. Asia Pacific was the only region where the use of illegal PC software products grew -- from 59% in 2007 to 61% last year, pushing companies' losses to more than 11 billion euros.

"The lowest-piracy countries are the United States, Japan, New Zealand, and Luxembourg, all near 20%," the report said. At the same time, because of its size, the United States emerged as the country with the largest monetary losses from piracy, at over 6.6 billion euros.

The CEE region accounted for 5.1 billion euros of all losses suffered by software companies last year, with Russia's share in that amount at 3.1 billion euros.

The Balkan countries with the highest piracy rates were Montenegro (83%), Albania (77%) and Serbia (74%), while Croatia's remained the lowest in the region for a second year in a row at 54%.

While Romania's PC software piracy rate dropped by two percentage points to 66%, the losses suffered by software companies in the country grew by 65%.

"This report attests [to] the impact of efforts to reduce software piracy in Romania," Romanian news agency Mediafax quoted BSA's local representative, Magda Popescu, as saying Tuesday.

The piracy rates of Bulgaria and Macedonia remained unchanged at 68% for a second year. But the losses suffered by Bulgarian companies more than doubled. In Macedonia losses grew by 21%.