The BSA has released a report on the year 2001. The purpose of the report is to review available data to determine the worldwide business software piracy rates and the associated
dollar losses.
The alliance said in its annual study, now in its eighth year, that it lost nearly $11 billion in sales to software piracy in 2001.
A more telling statistic was that 40 percent of all new software installed by businesses last year was obtained on the black market, up from 37 percent in 2000.
Since the study began in 1994, we have seen a steady decrease in the rate of software piracy. Unfortunately, this downward trend in piracy rates has not been evident in the past two years. In 2000, we started to notice stability in the level of piracy for developed countries, rather than the downward trend we expected. We speculated that after the reduction of casual piracy, we were seeing a core level of piracy that would be more persistent. |
In 2001, we saw the effects of a worldwide economic slowdown that hit technology spending particularly hard. The results of this year's study indicate thatsoftware piracy rose in response to the pressure of the curtailed spending of the economic downturn.
This is the first period of a general global economic slowdown since the study began in 1994. The results presented here suggest that the progress against piracy that was made in the 1990s is conditional. Compliance with software licensing is at risk of being considered an economic luxury that Can be abandoned in difficult times.
Mind that this study only reports about piracy in business, the BSA has not made studies of piracy losses due home copying. Read the entire study here.
Source: BSA.org
