The Software market currently states that over 35% of all softwares used world wide is pirated, Accounting to over 40 Billion US Dollars in losses (Source BSA.org). but most of us still wonder why buy something when you can get it for free? Well there is some thing you have to understand when it comes to software. There are 1000’s of free stuff which is actually free for all the users and there is something which requires you to pay, because there have been investments in the product, both in terms of money and also man power. For instance Microsoft is a billion dollar company , with the big share of losses in the desktop market. China, india and Russia are major players in Software piracy at least for microsoft. Over 67% of all microsoft products in india are pirated, China and Russia we have not been able to confirm the figures at the moment and are considerably lower this year (2009). Microsoft has over a few 1000 Staffs in each of its major market companies including india and China. Wondered how these guys are paid? Well they have to keep paying their staff and that money comes from these software sales. When there is piracy, these few good people loose their jobs in the market. They tend to move / migrate to other countries for jobs (wondered why most of the IT professionals in india choose to live and work abroad eh?). this directly affects the economy of the country in some way or the other too.. The companies increase the product price to make up for their losses in software piracy. There is a lot of mess in Updates as there are no bug fixes and updates for these pirated softwares, the Hackers and virus programmers have a good go on taking advantage of these loop holes creating a massive business for the anti virus companies andthe spamwares and blah blah blah.
Simply speaking , software piracy is like the Butterfly effect, A butterfly flaps its wings in africa to bring a tornado in new york!!! Think about it. Your actions have consequences and the consequesnces of global software piracy is not something you would want to really take.
