“The Business Software Alliance, an industry trade group that represents many software vendors, has made stamping out software piracy a major initiative. To that end, it commissions an annual survey of global piracy, performed by IDC. There’s not a whole lot of information about the methods employed in producing those numbers, so it’s difficult to know how reliable they are in absolute terms. But said figures may be valuable for detecting trends, in which case the news is good for the BSA: although piracy remains substantial, it isn’t growing at the rates it once was, and many industrialized countries have seen rates of piracy drop below 25 percent.”
Well, FLOSS usage is rising lately. Certain FLOSS solutions are better than commercial ones, so there’s no need to people without enough economical resources to use illegitimate copies (sorry BSA, but “pirate” sounds too retarded).
Also, there’s commercial platforms getting advantage of it. They cannibalize their components and make their own platforms, like Google’s Android of Palm’s WebOS. Even Apple does it!
Anyway, BSA looks as infamous like MPAA and RIAA. Who really cares of that USA corporate lobby other than certain politicians and governments pushed by USA? Oh wait…
Who cares of the average BSA bs? Most joe users avoid to pay for software, they’ll use the cheaper alternative if good enough and certain groups see Free Software with more interest. Software is still considerated as something not so important for living in most of the population, and this economical crisis makes people to take into consideration more important stuff (food, health, security, education, transport).
They just want to lobby against Europe, the BSA lobby group loves (software) patents and stronger copyright laws. They aren’t going to win, too much enemies and not benefits Europe companies at all. Even bad for smaller companies in their coutry, just benefits large corporations.
BSA is a member of IIPA (“International” Intellectual Property Alliance), despite of the name is mostly powerful USA lobby group including RIAA ( Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America, Association of American Publishers and BSA (Business Software Alliance). They are against governments adopting FOSS: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/02/big-content-condemn…
Europeans: Remember the “Special 301” Report?
Beware of ACTA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
Edited 2010-05-12 06:24 UTC