May 15
BSA today released the ninth edition of our Global Software Piracy Study — and in it, we have plowed new ground. This year’s study marks the first time anyone has directly asked a large sample of computer users around the world, “How often do you acquire pirated software?”
The answers people have given to that and other questions reveal sharp divides between the habits and outlooks of users in emerging and developed markets. Those differences help explain why the global piracy rate hovered at 42 percent last year while a steadily expanding marketplace in the developing world drove the commercial value of software theft to $63.4 billion.
Here’s a brief overview of the study’s findings:
Visit www.bsa.org/globalstudy for all the details.
The English author H.G. Wells is thought to have said, “Human history is, in essence, the history of ideas.” How right he was considering the visionary innovators who have transformed the world with great ideas. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Johann Gutenberg, plus more modern day icons such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates — to name but a few. It is the achievements of these and many others that we celebrate on 
Earlier this year, BSA reported in its annual 
In the global race to curb intellectual property theft and capture the 
BSA has recently conducted public-opinion research that finds some cause for optimism, though. Consider: 71 percent of the world thinks innovators should be paid for the products and technologies they develop, because it provides incentives for more technology advances.
Unauthorized copying of software used to require physically exchanging disks or other hard media through the mail or on the streets. This unauthorized copying was ultimately overshadowed by corporate end-user piracy, a pervasive form of copyright infringement that occurs when otherwise legitimate companies install software on more computers than the licenses they have purchased permit. But old-fashioned, unauthorized copying persists — and as broadband connections have become available around the world, it has spread from street markets to the Internet. 
