AT&T Tech Support 360
July 7, 2004 5:57 AM PDT
Software piracy losses double
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1. The numbers given for piracy losses presume that every single copy that was duplicated would have been a purchased copy made at the full list price. With the typical deep discounts that software packages sell for over list, this makes the piracy 'loss amount' numbers look much higher than they actually are as many who pirate software would either use something else or not use the program at all if they could not. When a single copy of a program costs the equivalent of ten times what the computer is worth - if it wasn't, say, donated equipment - and about a month or two of your entire income, there is no way you can afford to pay full list price and you would not have. Yet the industry would claim that they have 'lost' the net retail purchase price to this party's failure to purchase their product.
2. These numbers imply there was an actual cash loss to the producing company, like software stolen from a store. These are non-sales, where the company doesn't sell a product to someone because they pirated the product. Since the company has no idea who is using that copy, the number is an estimate, a guess based on their imagination of how much they think the sale would have been, presumed on a full-list price retail sale.
3. Are these losses being reduced by the amount of money each reproduced copy would have cost to make? If the product sells for, say, $425.00 and the materials such as the CD, box, manual, shipping and handling cost $25, then the alleged 'loss' is $400, not $425 since they didn't spend the money to reproduce that package that was never sold. And, of course, this again presumes a full-list-price sale did not take place.
It's like the figures you hear about the losses of the music industry due to piracy. Maybe it's easier to blame a drop in sales on piracy instead of lost interest by the public in an over priced uninteresting products.
I'm not naive enough to believe there isn't a lot of piracy going on but I'm also not naive enough to believe sales would go up, without piracy, by the amounts quoted from the software/music industries.
*AND* the definition of "pirated software" has widened, so the drop is even more significant