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Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add $400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released Wednesday by the Business Software Alliance and IDC.

That small quote should get you started on a very interesting article posted today at PCWorld.com. Unfortunately piracy controls are still very scarce worldwide IMHO; here in Ecuador piracy is done publicly, I mean it, and that's sad because with the exception of the occasional piece of junk, there are a lot of dedicated software makers and programmers that could have a better chance of success if piracy wasn’t so widespread.

I'd say you have to take any information coming from BSA with a grain of salt.

They exist to fight piracy and they are so committed that rounding some numbers, bending a couple of facts and ignoring the basic rules of gathering statistics is not a problem. Plus these absolutely laughable campaigns...

This is really sad because this makes their anti-piracy efforts seem overreacted and most people don't take them seriously.

Actually I think that any numbers coming from BSA can be adjusted by a factor of 2 or 3 for the benefit of software piracy. So if BSA says something will add $400 billion to world economy, the number is definently not bigger than $200 billion.

I've never heard of any of these orginizations actually making a difference. Hell, we know they don't. I remember playing Doom back in the day and seeing that ad "report piracy to SPA" or whatever. It didn't exactly do any good. If you think about it, everyone who knows someone that has a pirated copy is playing that same pirated copy on their PC because they knew someone with a copy. What these companies need to do is fire every employee they have and get someone who can actually help to stop piracy. Don't get me wrong, I'll admit that I've pirated probably $20,000 in software at LEAST and would be in jail for life if I had been indicted and convicted of each one of them, but the fact of it is I realize that if orginizations like these would actually do any good than jobs WOULD be created and this economy could flourish well above and beyond what it does today just in game sells alone. I think decreasing piracy by about 20% could alone fund this war and probably much more than that.

Let's all go out and buy ONE pc game today. Who knows, we may just pay for this war and give a few thousand people a job ;-).