More fun with numbers

I got a press release today from the Business Software Alliance about the results of a new survey.

“Thirty-five percent of the packaged software installed on personal computers (PC) worldwide in 2005 was illegal,” it reads, “amounting to $34 billion in global losses due to software piracy.”

Wait wait wait. That kind of logical leap is what the record companies use to come up with crazy-high figures for music piracy. It’s bad.

The problem with the premise is that is assumes that everyone would buy what they got for free. And that isn’t true. Someone who would have spent, say, $100 for Adobe’s low-end photo editor, Photoshop Elements, would be happy to use a pirated copy of the full Photoshop instead, even though he never would have bought it.

The BSA would call that a $600 loss (the cost of full Photoshop). In reality, it’s at most a $100 loss. And it might be less than that. The pirate might have been happy with an open-source alternative — The GIMP or GIMPShop.

That doesn’t excuse software piracy by any means, but it certainly means that the BSA’s numbers are wildly inflated. That’s especially true when it comes to software where there’s a popular free alternative — OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office, AVG Anti-Virus instead of McAfee, etc.

And the same thing applies to music piracy. Saying that pirates cost the industry X dollars per year only holds true if the pirate would have bought the music instead. And not all would.