It was recently reported that an RIAA lawsuit against LimeWire, seeking $72 trillion in damages, was shot down. A new study has revealed that more than half of all computer users had committed some form of content piracy, which leads to speculation on whether or not some overzealous collective might call for an arrest of them all.
The study was conducted by industry watchdog group Business Software Alliance, and posted in its ninth annual Global Software Piracy Study. Roughly 15,000 computer users from 33 countries were queried, and plainly asked, “How often do you acquire pirated software or software that is not fully licensed?” About 57% of respondents said that they were pirates, up from 42% in 2011, and the frequency of piracy was likewise up, which costs the software industry about $63.4 billion per year.
The BSA report states, “This year’s survey finds that frequent pirates – people who admit they acquire unlicensed software all of the time, most of the time, or occasionally – also are the most voracious software users,” adding, “They report installing 55 percent more programs of all types on their computers than do non-pirates. This gives them an outsized impact on the global piracy rate.” A discrepancy between emerging and established markets was also noted, to where users in developing economies install roughly 4 times more illegal software than those users of the 1st world.
The BSA, which is aligned with Apple, Microsoft and Adobe, is calling for stiffer fines for software pirates, and jail time. Right on. I wonder if they will call for the arrest of a large portion of the world’s population, along the same lines as the RIAA, when it asked for close to all of the money in the world from Limewire.
