BSA announces that global software piracy rate is dropping

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced that the global piracy rate of business software has been dropped from 40% to 39%. The decrease of one percent breaks with the trend of last years that always showed an increase of the piracy numbers. However this decrease still leaves a lot of problems as in Eastern Europe and the Asia Pacific over 90% of the companies is using pirated software.

Between 1994 and 2002, the U.S. piracy rate dropped to 24 percent from 32 percent and in Western Europe to 35 percent from 52 percent. North America and Western Europe are the largest software markets. However the BSA is not planning to retire yet.

We're pleased with the results, but we're still facing a piracy situation where nearly four in ten pieces of business software is used without authorization," said Beth Scott, BSA vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa. The BSA has spent huge sums to try to reduce the installing of unlicensed software duplicates in areas such as word processing and spreadsheet programs to avoid paying the license fees. The modest improvement brings to an end two straight years of piracy escalation. The industry had blamed the burgeoning traffic in copyright-protected materials on Internet file-sharing networks and on so-called "warez" trading sites for the recent upsurge in unlicensed software duplicates.

Source: Reuters.com