Lies, Damn Lies and Software Piracy Statistics
I am sure that by now you have all seen the many column inches which have been devoted to the revelation that the US’s much publicized intellectual property theft and software piracy statistics may not be entirely accurate.
In summary: the PRO-IP Act, introduced by the Bush administration created the role of Intellectual Property Enforcement Co-ordinator within the Whitehouse. Victoria Espinel, first incumbent of the role under Obama has asked the Government Accountability Office to take a close look at the figures on copyright infringement – including those on Software Piracy- and the GAO have concluded that the statistics and the methodology used to prepare them may be unreliable. They say that “it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts.” of copyright theft including software piracy.
You can read the full report here.
Before drawing the general conclusion the GAO look in detail at several industry-specific reports including the BSA’s annual report on software piracy. In this report they particularly take issue with the assumption that each pirated software copy equates to a lost sale.
We are a little puzzled by the furore caused by this software licensing statistics story. First up, is there a set of statistics anywhere that can’t be picked to pieces by a determined critic? Take a statistical report, hand it to another statistician for analysis and it’s almost inevitable that the outcome will be a criticism of the original report.
Then we need to consider that software piracy and copyright theft and illicit activities-how do you measure illicit activities and their impacts? I think we can be pretty confident that software pirates will not be queuing up to by surveyed on the subject. So in compiling any set of statistics we are going to have to rely on detected crime and a set of assumptions. In other words, it should have been obvious to anyone who gave the matter a moments thought, that software piracy statistics are bound to be a bit of a stab in the dark.
So, bearing this in mind, what might Ms Espinel have been hoping to achieve by such a public scrutiny of the copyright theft and software piracy statistics? Did she feel that a better understanding of the statistics would help her in cracking down on software piracy and copyright theft?
Who knows? However, the actual effect has been a bit of a field day for those who would have us believe that software piracy is really not that much of a problem.
Jon Gillespie-Brown CEO of software licensing solutions provider Nalpeiron comments:
“By casting doubt on software piracy statistics the GAO report has unintentionally served to undermine the authority and credibility of industry bodies like the BSA. The whole thing has been a huge distraction. We may not be able to precisely quantify the size of the software piracy problem, but we do know that it’s a huge drain on the economy. It’s time to stop bickering over statistics and get back to focussing on tackling the real problem.”
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