back to article BSA flashes gums at 'online software scams'

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) claimed late last week to have issued nearly 50,000 takedown notices about BitTorrent files in the first half of this year. The group, in its latest effort to crack down on what it describes as “online software scams”, claimed (pdf) that BSA members lost an estimated $525m in sales as a …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Pirate

    Ebay Takedowns

    I must say i agree with the ebay takedowns because some people arent looking on ebay for dodgy software, they are looking on ebay for cheaper legit software, because they are sick of Rip Off Britain.

    As for torrents, well thats never good news because i have in the past and still do frequent torrent sites, obviously ftp or even usenet is preffered by myself and i bet a few others here, but torrents do have alot of often rare or older stuff that might not be available from other sources.

    and no matter how many sites the Bull Shit Alliance threaten/scare, its good to know that there are plenty of my good sites left, and TPB lives on :)

    When will they realize, if the companies or the gov wont do bugger all about rip off britain, the more people will simply bypass the gross overpricing and inconvenience of buying legit, drm bullshit ridden original's.

    Spore is a recent good example.

  2. James Pickett

    Grrr!

    "It asked eBay et al to shut down the dodgy auctions"

    And did they?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How does BSA know they're pirated?

    "The BSA said it hunted down 13,800 online auctions punting more than 50,500 individual software products with a total retail value of over $13.3m in 2007."

    If it shut down the auction *before* the sale, how does it know the product was a pirate copy?

    Or were they resale copies of genuine products that the BSA claims are pirated?

  4. A J Stiles

    There is an alternative to pirated software

    There is an alternative to both pirated and paid-for software, you know.

    If you don't want to pay £500 for an office suite, you don't have to. You can use OpenOffice.org. If you don't want to pay £500 for a photo editor, you don't have to. You can use the GIMP. If you don't want to pay £200 for an operating system, you don't have to. You can use Ubuntu. And for the vanishingly small minority of cases where there really is no Open Source equivalent, there's still pencil and paper.

    Just think about the fact that as long as someone is giving away pirate copies of Microsoft Office for little more than the price of a blank CD, there is effectively *zero* chance of anyone making a success of selling for £50 an office suite with enough functionality for nine users out of ten.

  5. Martin Silver badge
    Coat

    @There is an alternative to pirated software

    "Just think about the fact that as long as someone is giving away pirate copies of Microsoft Office for little more than the price of a blank CD, there is effectively *zero* chance of anyone making a success of selling for £50"

    You don't think thats why there is no real protection in MS-office do you?

    But that would be an abuse of their monopoly position and MS would never dream of that.

  6. Jonathan Walsh
    Stop

    How do they know?

    people might have downloaded stuff with no intention of buying it. call me a freetard if you want but they can't conver the number of downloads into the amount of profit that they have lost!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    TPB

    But I wasn't going to buy it anyway!

    Don't count my non-patronage as lost profit.

  8. A J Stiles
    Coat

    Re: How do they know, TPB

    Another thing I've wondered about:

    Does it count as a lost sale of Windows, IIS, SQL Server, Exchange and MS Office, if somebody installs GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL, Exim, Dovecot and OpenOffice.org instead?

  9. Richard Sloan
    Gates Horns

    @A J Stiles

    While in MS Office the features of Word and Powerpoint are easily replicated, Excel is still a world better than FOSS equivalents right now. GIMP is good but it is fiddly to use, particularly when working with layers where Photoshop comes into it's own. Windows does have a lot of downsides but is still a necessary evil when you need to administer Active Directory, and there are still many games and legacy apps which do not work in WINE. This is why some people still pirate when there are alternatives, the rest of them just cannot be bothered to learn something unfamiliar.

    I'm not particularly an advocate of MS and so on, but these are the reasons it is installed on my machine at work, and occasionally still used at home.

  10. A J Stiles

    @ Richard Sloan

    You may be using the advanced features of Excel, but if so then you aren't the average user. I have seen, with my own eyes, someone adding up a column of figures in a spreadsheet using a calculator and then entering the result. No kidding.

    And if you're using Active directory, then you must be a business and therefore you can afford to pay for your software. Or pay a school leaver with an anti-Microsoft chip on their shoulder to set up NIS and NFS for you.

    Legacy applications WILL need to be rewritten eventually as many depended for their normal operation on the very things that made old versions of Windows insecure. (The main cause of this is self-taught "developers" using pirate copies of the toolchain.) When you get your bespoke legacy applications rewritten, demand the Source Code this time.

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