"rely on" of just use?

I thought the percentage was higher than that.

Well.... yeah.... Do you think people actually PAY for Adobe products?

In other news, nearly 1 in 4 pieces of software on my computers are legit

I know for a fact the USAF does not use pirated software at all.
-stares left and right-

"The study, released earlier this week by the BSA, confirms that almost one in four businesses (23 percent) runs software without licenses in the workplace."

The way that sentence is written leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

They are all playing halo 2

Sanmina-SCI

With the prices for proprietary software like the recordkeeping stuff that my father's veterinary clinic uses, I'm not surprised at all with this statistic.

1000 bucks for a piece of software that looks like it was made by a 2nd year CS major? I'd tell them to sit and twirl.

Your farker hates this cliche.

um, yea work, um... thats why i have pirated stuff, um cos of work.



/blatant
I STEAL!
i have no excuse, im just scum and i dont like to pay for stuff

Linux
Firefox
OpenOffice
etc.
etc.
etc.

More interesting is that one in four employees is a pirate.

/Aaaaarrrrrrr

As opposed to 1 in 1 students?

Oh shiat, you mean you actually have to PAY for software?

/reformatting HD.

Or so says the software piracy association.

Dimensiation wins.

The study, released earlier this week by the BSA, confirms that almost one in four businesses (23 percent) runs software without licenses in the workplace. Yet, paradoxically, 89 percent of the 1500 professionals polled agree that illegal software is "a risk no business can afford to take."

That paragraph is stupid.

1) That's not a paradox. It can be easily resolved if the 89% work at the other 75%. Suppose that the businesses that are the problem are relatively small employers; then it could be possible that nobody who thought it was an unacceptable risk would work at a business that took said risk.

2) Even if it is an unresolvable paradox, do these professionals have the authority to make the decision for their business? There's no indication that they do.

The VP of the company I work for sent out a mass E-mail to everyone in the company, told us to check all the software on our computers, in case we have something unlicensed. Most of the computers probably do, and most of it was put on the machines by the head of the IT department.

Danger! Danger!

* DO NOT TRUST THE BUSINESS SOFTWARE ALLIANCE! *

These guys are funded by software companies to enforce anti-piracy measures. Of course their studies are going to be biased, showing that piracy is rampant.

The BSA is an organization that thrives on Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They will target a selected area, and then send a threatening letter to every business in that area. How do I know? I've gotten the threatening letter.

The letter says something to the effect of, "we know you're pirating software, and you have 90 days to own up to it, or we will take legal action."

They do this with zero proof of any wrongdoing, and with no authority to come in and look at your stuff. They use these scare tactics to get people to own up and admit to something they may or may not be doing. It's wrong, and hell, it should be criminal.

As soon as I saw this headline, the first thing I thought was, "I bet the BSA was behind the study." And I was right.

Dimensiation

As opposed to 1 in 1 students?

...and 1 in 1 Fark photoshoppers.

I dont consider it piracy, I consider it an unlimited user license.

Hah, I had a professor for Art 200 (intro to photoshop, illustrator, etc...) who suggested a few avenues I could pursue to get pirated copies of the software we used in the class, for "personal" use.

So this is a bad thing? Oh.


Crap.
I neeeeeeeeeed my photoshop though. Dont make me use The Gimp.

More Microsoft FUD. It never ends...

I agree with Will N. Dowd: the Linux/Firefox/Open Office route is free and much less painful than anything suggested by the BSA.

It's kind of funny.

I was talking to some people who work in media.

They used pirated software.

Sort of ironic. They want intellectual property rights, but they don't respect the intellectual property rights of others.

I also find it sort of funny that people want software, but don't want to pay for it or even need it.

How many people actually need their unlicensed Photoshop CS?

How many could just use MS Paint to accomplish the same tasks?

dillenger69:

Do you have multiuser license prices for Microsoft products?

I honestly do not know what they cost. I'm covered under a multiuser license, so I don't pay anything. But I am interested to know.

jerkychew

They do this with zero proof of any wrongdoing, and with no authority to come in and look at your stuff. They use these scare tactics to get people to own up and admit to something they may or may not be doing. It's wrong, and hell, it should be criminal.

If thier accusation causes you some sort of problem - yes. Was this by certified letter or was it a blanket issue? I would have told them to drop trou and show me da infringement, date and time stamp, isp, name of prog, the whole tamale. Unless they disclose this, tell them to go pound, absolutley. And even if they do tell them to go pound. Then send a copy of that letter to EFF.org, pronto. They need shiat like this if they are even going to address dodgy pratices like this.

Many people do not know what constitutes unlawful use and fair use and authorized use. If you have no farking idea what is going on and you take the disk out of one machine and put it into another you are not a criminal - you are uninformed (most of the time). They wanna play nice and act like a corporate entity, how about you get your shiat together and they educate your it people, staff, management, everyone, what is and what is not infringement, then offer to be on call if someone has a problem.

Solution - never ever buy shiat that associates itself with the BSA. Who the fark are these people anyway? Right now - thats not possible for many people, until someone comes up with a reasonable alternative to Adobe stuff (not going to happen soon). The BSA is like da collection agency, only they could seriously give a fark if you owe a debt or not (like most collection agencies IMO). They just need to make it 'appear' that you do and thereafter let your own fears do the work.

Yep, I sure do.

Likely I owe Linus big bucks, and the Apache group, Perl, and Firefox, and GNU, and SUSE, and all those copies of Solaris I downloaded for free. I haven't paid for Sun's Solaris or Java for something like 6 years or so. BSA can kiss my open sores.

err,

my Open Sources.

My boss spends THOUSANDS of dollars on a dumbass Microsoft Partner Bundle thing, where he gets every new Microsoft when they come out... he doesn't use a good 75% of what he gets, and yet het can't afford to pay for a single "art" program for the office.

/works for a "marketing agency"

i farking hate my boss.

who do you report piracy to anyways?

Linux + Mozilla + Open Office + Gimp + Nvu = No more digital fuedalism being vassals of Microsoft!

/Digital Visigoth

But, the fact is that nobody needs all those features that software has that people pirate.

I mean use Photoshop for FARK contests. If I were using it for making magazine prints or professional DVD titles or something then it'd be some other matter.

On the other hand, I think a lot of buisness buy software that no-one is going to use. I mean our lab bought the entire Adobe something suite and all we use is Photoshop to resize images once (and it was a big pain since they were 1000 images and all had to resized). Might have been better using a command line resizing tool or something!

Anyway, software companies know that pirated software is like trial version software without them having to host them on their servers and waste bandwidth on it.

And, then to counter-balance get BSA on it and threaten. And, people will want to keep their pretty photoshop for resizing images and pay up.

And, let me not even get started on Microsoft Office!

Based on personal experience and given the use of the word "rely", I'd say it's closer to 1 in 6. However, with the wording of the EULA in the last couple of generations of Microsoft software, I'd assume that every company using a Microsoft product made this decade will be using it in some sort of "illegal" way.

after looking into buying microsoft 2k server with 10 cals,
for a local small biz that runs 4 98 boxes, 3 xp, 1 mac, 2 2000. It ended up the licensing for just the os on the server would cost more than the server....


long story short...

thankyou redhat.....

theflyingdutchman's got a good point. I'm an IT contractor and I've had a bunch of clients in the film and television industry (Australia) over the years.

A couple of years ago they were the hardest ones to convince that buying a single license of a piece of software meant that you could only install it on one machine. There was a bust recently of a post production house who got several million dollars in fines (they no longer exist) - subsequently it's not so hard convincing my clients to spend the money.

I also have some clients in the education market - they pay a fraction of the retail costs for commercial software and yet they are now the most difficult ones to convince that they need to pony up for legit software.

ArcInfo, Geographic Information Server, plus extensions:
$12,000 +

I hate ESRI. But those GRASS guys are cool.

It's also probably likely that those businesses using unlicensed programs don't even know it. They probably bought it legitimitely and somewhere in the mix an unlicensed copy ended up on another computer, which would likely qualify for BSA's claim.

Do you have multiuser license prices for Microsoft products?

MS Project 2003 Pro (License Only): $539
Adobe Acrobat V 6.0 Pro (License Only): $226.80

Just a couple of recent quotes I've had to get for work.

I want your soul

1 in 4? I doubt it's that low.... I am sure it is much higher than that, if you include sharing licenses

One in four may not be a meaningful statistic. What is is on an employee basis or a company revenue basis? Most corporations try to keep legal, but the publishers don't make it easy. I can see how easy it is for the little guy to be clueless.
And people ripping off software for home use is the best advertising the publisher's could buy. Some enlightened publishers actually acknowledge this and offer free non-commercial licenses.

It's also probably likely that those businesses using unlicensed programs don't even know it. They probably bought it legitimitely and somewhere in the mix an unlicensed copy ended up on another computer, which would likely qualify for BSA's claim.


Exactly. Especially if your coworker is a moran and loads a pc with everything in the software library, ghosts the machine and puts that image on every pc he rolls out for 6 months until I kindly explain to him why he can't do that.

/And I was kind, too.

I'd say a good amount of the "pirating" is done by companies who don't have a lawyer on hand to decipher the EULA for them.