It’s quite amazing the way the people that patrol the main looking out for software pirates constantly ruin a good case by economic illiteracy and ludicrous hyperbole, with Business Software Alliance president Robert Holleyman claiming that Microsoft Corp would be four times larger if it weren’t for counterfeiting, and that US software companies lose $12,000m a year to pirates – assertions that take no account of the fact that if the practice were eliminated altogether, buying and usage behaviour would alter dramatically; around the world, governments have found that the tax take actually rises when tax rates are cut so that the incentive to divert effort into evasion is reduced, and productive economic activity rises; in its numbers, the Association also fails to separate the losses from two quite different kinds of piracy, the systematic counterfeiting of products that are then passed off as the genuine article – complete with made in China Micorsoft holograms on the one hand, and, on the other, the casual, informal, often innocent but still illegal copying of small applications that goes on in most offices – and differs little from the regular illegal photocopying of newspapers and other print publications that goes on wherever a copier is installed, or the playing of copyright recorded music at small public gatherings.
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