Casual theft

Poland has one of the highest levels of software piracy in the EU, according to research ordered by Business Software Alliance (BSA) and carried out by IT-research firm IDC. With approximately 58 percent of all software having been obtained illegally, the country ranks second in the EU after Greece. The EU average is 35 percent, and as IT experts point out, companies and institutions contribute significantly to this figure.

"The smaller the company, the greater the probability of piracy," claims Bartłomiej Witucki, a spokesman for BSA. "Very often the management is to be blamed for this state of affairs," he stated, adding that Poland does not have a tradition of respecting intellectual property. He argued that the use of legal programs would bring Poland substantial profits. "A decrease of illegal software by 10 percent would create 32,000 new jobs and increase the budget revenue by EUR 200 (zł.778) million," Witucki estimated.

"Poles are the same as people in other countries," argued Dr Wacław Iszkowski, the president of the Polish Chamber of Information Technology and Telecommunications. In his view, the problem lies in the excessive prices of software. "If it continues this way, in the next two or three years our main software provider may be China," said Iszkowski. However, Witucki claims illegal software can also be found in large, prosperous institutions with plenty of money to spend.

Still, IT experts see growing sensitivity among entrepreneurs to the issue of software legality. In fact, the market of software-auditing companies is growing. As BSA's Witucki estimates, the number of computers checked for illegal software by an auditing company has risen from several hundred to several thousand in the last four years.