Seeing how many cd’s were shared via mp3 files via the internet, and how it affected the music industry, I wonder how many people who use, say, the latest Adobe Photoshop, actually hold the proper license?
In other words, what is the piracy rate on software, specifically in the developed world? Is it higher for games rather than applications? Is the piracy rate declining or falling?
I’d guess the “piracy rate” of photoshop and similar popular but fairly expensive pieces of software is huge. For PS, I’d guess it would be at least 3 to 1 (as in, 3 times as many “pirated” copies as legitimate ones), but it may be a lot higher.
Note that that includes all kinds of “home use”. Adobe is targeting professionals (and nominally, students - but I don’t know any students why pay for software) - most professionals do in fact have legitimate copies.
I would wonder about the rate for businesses. I worked for Starwood and we did an audit of comptuers for the North America Division and only three hotels were compliant. All of those were in Canada. (This was back in 2003)
I know back then the MIS Director of North America for Starwood was trying to negotiate blanket licenses for all their hotels managed.
I think that is were the real profits are lost.
Some software licenses are different. For instance we had software to write to PDF (It wasn’t Adobe, I forget the name) but it was nice because they allowed us to put it on the public drive and we purchased five licenses for it. They allowed any number of users to USE it (on their station from the public drive) but no more than five people could be on it at once.
Adobe on the other hand instisted every single station have a license, that’s why we went with someone else.
Surf over to the Business Software Alliance web site:
For some detailed numbers, see http://global.bsa.org/idcglobalstudy2007//studies/summaryfindings_globalstudy07.pdf (PDF Warning)