More than one in three new business applications installed last year were pirated, representing a loss to the global software industry of $11bn. According to the fourth annual study on global software piracy of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA), 615 million new applications were installed worldwide during 1998, of which 231 million (38%) were pirated.
The SIIA and the BSA, the world’s two largest software industry bodies concluded that, even in industrialized countries, there is still a long way to go to finally eliminate software piracy. The US, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Canada all featured in the top ten list of countries with the greatest piracy rates by value, and who between them accounted for $7.3 billion, or 67% of worldwide piracy losses.
In some developing countries and in eastern Europe however, the proportion of pirated applications is increasing. Russian piracy, for instance, increased from 89% in 1997 to 92% last year. Although rates are declining slightly in the far east and middle east, countries from these regions still make up most of the top ten list of piracy measured as a percentage of total software. At the top of this list, as 97% is Vietnam, followed by China (96%), Oman ((93%). Lebanon (93%), CIS-less Russia (93%), Russia (92%), Indonesia (92%), Bulgaria (90%), and Bahrain (89%).
