software piracy and global economy

tomer dror

according to PWC(PricewaterhouseCoopers)company here in israel a decrease in software piracy from 41% to 25% until 2004 can generate 15,000 jobs...!! tomer

George

Not sure how many jobs the piracy itself creates, so it's hard to figure out the balance to tell whether it will help economy or not.

Kevin Power

It's foolish to think that piracy is going to go down. Especially with most of these groups creating new super systems and other technologies. With the fall of the global econ., they need to up there their end to meet what they were making before. Especially, if they are running large websites, mainframes, etc. X|

Chris Meech

Yeah right. And if everybody went out and bought the songs that they downloaded from the Net, 50,000 new jobs would be created for the next 10 years. At least this according to the RIAA. ;P Chris

Christian Skovdal Andersen

I think these numbers are way to big. I do not know how this astronomical number is calculated in this case, but usually they are calculated on the basis of how many that are copying the software instead of how many that would actually buy it, if they could not copy it. An example: I use Adobe Photoshop maybe a couple of times per month. I will not go out and pay €1500 for that. If I had to pay, I would propably learn how to use one of the low cost alternatives: Gimp, Corel Photopaint, Paintshop Pro etc. Even if the numbers where right, the majority of these 15K jobs would be created in the software industry, where it is already too hard findind qualified working capacity. Instead of whine about software piracy, they should consider lowering the prices, put in extra value or do something else that would make users pay. If people want to copy your software they will do it no matter what! Christian Skovdal Andersen