Slump spells good times for pirates

By : Greg Goodale

   Poland’s software piracy rate fell by 6% in 2000, its most significant drop in five years. But some in the industry fear that the sluggish economy could slow or even reverse the trend this year.

   “You have to account for the fact that people will seek savings in dishonest ways,” said Krzysztof Janiszewski, anti-piracy specialist at U.S. software giant Microsoft. “We may see that in this poor economic climate people will use tools that they have not paid for.”

   The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a worldwide grouping of software producers aimed at promoting the use of licensed software, said in its 2001 report that economic decline will spell an increase in the use of unlicensed software. “There is more change in the attitudes towards piracy in periods of economic growth … than in times of slower growth,” it said.

   “Many people consider software prices to be too high,” said Grzegorz Księżopolski, vice president of Wimal, a distributor of Adobe and Macromedia products in Poland. “(Here), $1,000 for a program has a different value than in Western Europe.”

   At 54%, Poland’s piracy rate is significantly higher than the global average, but this compares favorably to Russia and other CIS countries, where the BSA estimates more than 80% of software in use is unlicensed. The country’s software market is still relatively small, which means that financial losses from piracy in Poland represent only 3% of global losses, considerably less than Asia, which accounts for 36% of all revenues lost worldwide. The size of the market means that companies like U.S. software producer Adobe do not have offices in Poland and are not directly involved in combating piracy.

   The main victims of software piracy are the manufacturers of the best-known titles in any field. David Powell, managing director of Copyright Control Services, a U.K. company that monitors and combats the global distribution of pirate software on the Internet, said operating systems and graphics software were the most frequently pirated. “Besides Microsoft and Adobe products, we’re seeing interest in all Web-building products, networking tools and 3-D modeling software, which are all very expensive,” Powell said.

   But while Poland’s piracy rate is damaging for software producers, it is harder on Polish software distributors, whose revenues were dinted by the $103 million worth of sales lost to piracy in 2000, according to BSA estimates. “It’s possible that our sales would be three to four times greater if there was a higher level of awareness,” Księżopolski said. “If the economy was growing steadily and new firms were created … we would have the potential to sell 10 times more than we sell now.”

   According to Marcin Czajkowski, director of the Polish division of Autodesk, a U.S. producer of computer-aided design software, the use of pirated products not only deprives producers of revenue, but can also harm their reputation. “Pirates don’t provide customer support … this frustrates users as they have no source of information (on how to operate the products), which creates rumors that certain functions don’t work or that the products do not have certain types of functionality,” Czajkowski said.