US Software Piracy at 20%
I have not blogged recently because I have been busy giving radio and press interviews while vacationing in Hawaii for a few weeks. However, I could not help but comment on the 2007 State Piracy Study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) that was released recently. In it, BSA claims that
The national average for software piracy in 2007 was 20%, meaning that one in five pieces of PC software in use in the United States was unlicensed. States with piracy rates well above the national average include California, 25%; Illinois, 22%; Nevada, 25%; and Ohio, 27%. Business Software Alliance - Lost Revenues from Software Piracy in Eight States Would Have Been Enough to Fund 54,000 High Tech Workers, Build 100 Schools or Hire 25,000 Police Officers
The report goes on to say that the $’s lost from the eight states studied represent financial losses greater than the financial losses from any single country in the world except China.
The good news, if you can call it that, is the US had the lowest software piracy rate of any of the 108 countries studied.
Software piracy is to theft what white lies are to lies. In both cases it is all too easy for people to tell themselves a story about how it doesn’t fully count somehow. Everyone else is doing it. No one will know. Or a myriad of other rationalizations.
If you have pirated software on your computer and you feel a bit guilty about it, this is a hopeful sign. It means you haven’t become completely numb to the ethics of the situation and you have not completely bought your attempted rationalizations to yourself.
Ethical habits start with the small things — such as software piracy. Fortunately, in the case of software piracy, it is a relatively cheap proposition to practice doing the right thing and develop good ethical decision making habits. These could come in handy when you find yourself in situations with bigger stakes.
Tags: computerethics, business ethics, clint korver, ethics for the real world
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July 24th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
[...] that figure isn’t reason enough to forgo pirated software, Clint Korver over at ethics for the real world, offers another rationale. He says ethical habits start with small things - even such things as [...]