Neowin.net - Report: Software piracy dips

Report: Software piracy dips

Posted by Michael Stanclift on 06 June 2003 - 05:04 · 9 comments & 996 views

Corporations cracked down on pirated software last year, trimming the glut by a percentage point, an industry report said on Tuesday.

The rare bit of good news (for the corporations) comes at a tough time for software and media conglomerates. They are battling to stem the black market trade of cut-rate or free software, music and movie copies available online and on the street.

Industry lobby group Business Software Alliance (BSA) said the worldwide software piracy rate fell last year to 39 percent from 40 percent. The 2002 figure is 10 percentage points below the 1994 level, the point at which the industry first confronted the problem in a united front, suggesting the group's anti-piracy lobbying and education initiatives are showing results.

"We're pleased with the results, but we're still facing a piracy situation where nearly four in ten pieces of business software is used without authorization," said Beth Scott, BSA vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa.

The modest improvement brings to an end two straight years of piracy escalation. The industry had blamed the burgeoning traffic in copyright-protected materials on Internet file-sharing networks and on so-called "warez" trading sites for the recent upsurge in unlicensed software duplicates.

View: BSA Press Release

News source: CNN

TCP breaks down large files into small packets of about 1500 bytes, each carrying the address of the sender and the recipient. The sending computer transmits a packet, waits for a signal from the recipient that acknowledges its safe arrival, and then sends the next packet.

If no receipt comes back, the sender transmits the same packet at half the speed of the previous one, and repeats the process, getting slower each time, until it succeeds.

This means that even minor glitches on the line can make a connection very sluggish. Because Fast TCP uses the same packet sizes as regular TCP, the hardware that carries messages around the net will still work. The difference is in software and hardware on the sending computer, which continually measures the time it takes for sent packets to arrive, and how long acknowledgements take to come back.

This reveals the delays on the line, giving early warnings of likely packet losses. The Fast TCP software uses this to predict the highest data rate the connection can support without losing data.

Since the packets are the same size as those used in TCP, none of the equipment along the internet itself will have to be modified, and no new hardware will be needed on computers receiving the data.

The first practical test of Fast TCP took place in November at a supercomputing conference. Researchers from Caltech, Stanford and CERN near Geneva in Switzerland, sent data 10,000 kilometres from Sunnyvale, California, to CERN at an average rate of 925 megabits per second. Ordinary TCP managed just 266 megabits per second on the same routes.

By ganging 10 Fast TCP systems together, the researchers have achieved transmission speeds of over 8.6 gigabits per second, which is more than 6000 times the capacity of ordinary broadband links.

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#1 Posted by btallack on 06 Jun 2003 - 05:06: Do these figures include the P2P networks? I would have expected the numbers to go up, now that it's a lot more accessible to the less experianced users.

#2 Posted by CyberKewl on 06 Jun 2003 - 05:18: You can't possibly stop piracy. I've never heard them blame the high price of software, but instead always blame file sharing networks and stuff like that. This is no different from the music industry & mp3's...

#3 Posted by werejag on 06 Jun 2003 - 07:46: how do they rate this?

can they see how many people trade?

i dont think so!! sounds like another made up news press from the bsa to convince us of the evil

#4 Posted by longwilli on 06 Jun 2003 - 08:20: yep i agree there is no effective messure to test this

(2 replies) #5 Posted by poind on 06 Jun 2003 - 10:39: Depending on who you are (say, Microsoft?), you probably can (?) track to some degree outright illegally sold copies in places like Southeast Asia, or track serials logging in for updates from a region vs. those you know you've sold. They've got to be able to estimate the number of copies being used somewhere vs. what they know have been actually provided. I can't imagine there are too many on a Microsoft OS who don't ever get updates, for example.

Would there be some way they can better track software outright used in businesses? For some reason, given the generally more public business reporting requirements and so on, they would seem to be easier to track if one could figure out a method of deduction (how many computers does this place own, what did they actually buy from us, what contacts/update requests are we getting from this domain...).

MP3's and the like (though not the "software" referred to in the claim), must be much more difficult to track. Never can know what was actually a "lost sale" vs. curiosity subsequently deleted, or when someone's simply downloaded an MP3 of something they already own simply for convenience sake, for example. Not quite the same as software.

Maybe in the big scheme of things, the figures are simply showing improvements in places (like SE Asia) buying things properly rather than via still relatively trackable illegal markets. (???)

Last edited by 22385 on 06 Jun 2003 - 11:10

#6 Posted by Zeni on 06 Jun 2003 - 22:11: What are they basing this on? Asking people if they pirate? LoL "Uhhh no sir... I don't do illegal things....."

#7 Posted by fdiaz2day on 09 Jun 2003 - 14:39: I didn't notice the drop...

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