Posted on: Tuesday, June 3, 2003

TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY
Campaign targets software piracy

By Anick Jesdanun
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Worldwide piracy of business software products like Microsoft Office declined slightly in 2002 because of better education and more aggressive tactics in stopping Internet piracy, software industry officials say.

The downturn follows two years of increases blamed in part on the rise of distributing illegal copies online, according to a study released today by the Business Software Alliance.

The study estimates that 39 percent of business software products in use last year were not legally obtained. The global piracy rate steadily dropped from 49 percent in 1994, the first study, to 36 percent in 1999, yet rose to 40 percent in 2001.

The main source of software piracy remains with businesses buying one copy of software legally and then installing it over several computers, said Robert Holleyman, president and chief executive of the Business Software Alliance.

To combat that, the alliance continued circulating brochures on piracy and conducting amnesty campaigns encouraging businesses to pay for additional copies without threat of civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution, which could lead to fines and even imprisonment.

"Our educational efforts are really paying dividends," Holleyman said.

Last year, the software group also began using an automated software "robot" to find sites for downloading pirated software and computers that share such programs over Kazaa and other file-swapping networks. Previously, investigators looked for such piracy manually.

Representatives for the music and movie industries say piracy is growing given the ease of sharing pirated files over the Internet.

Software manufacturers have had a head start, Holleyman said.

"Technology through the Internet is only now beginning to facilitate the very easy, illegal copying of music and movies," he said. "And for software, because every PC is a software copying machine, since inception we have had a problem."

Companies are trying to prevent single copies from being used on multiple computers by requiring special activation codes tied to a specific computer.