Posted on 05/18/2007 8:51:50 AM PDT by Paul Ross
China pirates less software
InTech News, 17 May 2007
The software piracy rate in China is down for the third consecutive year. That’s the good news. The bad news is about 82% of the software the Chinese use is illegal.
The Wall Street Journal reported piracy has been declining for three years, according to new estimates from an industry group, creating hundreds of millions of dollars in new business in the world's second largest personal-computer market by unit sales.
Software piracy is still high by international standards: The study, conducted by research firm International Data Corp. for the Business Software Alliance, estimated 82% of software used in China in 2006 was pirated, down from 86% in 2005. That compares with a global average of 35% both years.
Illegal software usage in China stood at 92% as recently as 2003. The reduction of 10 percentage points in China's piracy rate over three years avoided $864 million in losses for legitimate software providers, according to IDC.
Meanwhile, the size of China's legitimate software market grew to $1.2 billion in 2006, an 88% increase from the previous year, said the report, issued Wednesday.
The gains against software piracy have come even as other industries, such as Hollywood film studios and luxury-goods makers, complain that the Chinese government has made little progress in curbing the ready availability of illegal copies and knockoffs of their products.
China isn't alone in making improvements.
Other large developing countries with a big software-piracy problem, notably Russia, India, and Brazil, also managed to push down piracy rates last year, the report said.
Rates of software piracy remained stable and relatively low in major economies such as the U.S. and the U.K., and declined slightly in Japan.
Nonetheless, losses from piracy are still sizable, the report said, and the software alliance called on governments, including China's, to toughen penalties and put more resources into enforcement of antipiracy laws.
There is a gun to your head with 6 bullets, you remove one bullet and put it back to your head.
Feel better now?
(That or they have grown so much that the AMOUNT of stolen software is the same (after all, how much faster can you run off CD’s than they already are?...) but the percentage of stolen software to total software has gone down.
(By the way, the Chinese culture has been stealing Western technology since the West outstripped them in the early 1600’s: the Chinese University has a 1650’s Venetian mechanical calculator (gears and lever operated) and, right next to it, a rebuild Chinese version of the same calculator.)
1. Aborts girls
2. Harvests prisoner organs
3. Kills our pets
4. Steals our technology
5. Pirates our software, movies
Anything else?
Missed just one...
6. Buy our politicians.
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