BSA Tries To Convince People That Antipiracy Efforts Help The Economy
from the contradicting-studies dept
It was just a few months ago that the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights came out with a report saying that current intellectual property laws are much more damaging than helpful on developing nations - and suggesting that those nations not follow such laws. Such findings must have scared the intellectual property cartel in the US quite a bit. Now, the BSA (the intellectual property enforcement arm of the software industry) has come out with their own, competing report saying that strong intellectual property compliance helps build economies. Specifically, the study points out that there is a correlation between countries that have low piracy rates and countries that have a large tech industry. Of course, as any first year statistics student will tell you, correlation doesn't mean causation in any way - and there are any number of reasons why the correlation might be there, that has nothing to do with anti-piracy efforts.
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BSA is dreaming (again)
It is obvious that piracy rates is higher in the poorer countries (expressed as a percentage of total software sales), because M$ (and other) software is just too expensive for them.
So all this study really proves is that economic success (i.e. wealth) of a country correlates with the econonic success (i.e. wealth) of that same country.
Shock, horror!
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