Software pirates are more likely to be caught by accident than by security measures or software audits, according to a survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC).
The PWC Product Piracy Survey 2003, published on Wednesday, discovered that more than one in three cases of piracy only came to light because of an accident, while security measures and software audits accounted for around one in four and one in five cases respectively.
Software piracy is a large and growing problem because it is so easy, said David Marston, lead partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Licensing Management Practice. "Any company which licenses its intellectual property and has global distribution is at a high risk," he said, claiming there are still too many countries where piracy is culturally accepted, making it very difficult to catch offenders.
Siobhan Carroll, regional manager of northern Europe at the Business Software Alliance (BSA), told ZDNet UK that in the UK, around one in four applications are not legally licensed, something she argued other industries would not accept. "The US has the lowest piracy rate (23 percent) but this it is still unacceptable. If you look at retail, the rate is between 1 and 3 percent -- and they are throwing their arms up," she said.
According to Carroll, there are two types of illegal software users: intentional and unintentional. "We understand that companies do not always go out to flout the law. It can be because of high growth and sometimes ignorance," she said.
Marston said that when piracy occurs, it is often because applications go "missing" and are then distributed, licence-free. "This is not easy to detect unless companies do a regular and systematic reconciliation of products sold," he said.
Funny thing is that I tried to tell Roxio how I bought a “copied” version of Roxio Easy Media Creator (Version 7) via eBay and they didn’t seem to care. I figured by the feedback that the person had sold the same software at least 17 times. May have been more. How do I know it was copied? When I got it the CD key would not work. I emailed the person and that person emailed me the correct CD key. If it were the original software, how would he know that if he had sent me the original software that was not registered? The second problem was that it had already been registered and I couldn’t register it.
I spent my own money to call long distance to talk with Roxio and tell them the problem. Gave them my email address and phone number. Have never received any correspondence from them.
So, I doubt that chance always catches the bad guys.