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
