Software piracy rate by country - U.S. lowest, at 20% | Hacker News Reader

Software piracy rate by country - U.S. lowest, at 20%

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17 pointsDabAsteroid15 comments

It seems there is a very strong correlation between software piracy and GDP per capita. This may point to a cause for software piracy, namely that many people simply can't afford the software they need or want.

In Armenia buying Microsift office would set you back roughly 1.2 months pay. (rough numbers here: office $500, Armenian GDP per capita $4900 according to wikipedia)

I suspect it is a causation, not correlation. I'm from Malaysia. The cost of Photoshop CS3 Extended here is about 4 times average monthly salary.

causation leads to correlation no?

Yes, but a correlation does not mean there has to be a causation.

Sorry if I didn't make my original point clear enough.

Yes I agree. I just want to emphasize the "causation" effect because people here generally dislike piracy but they don't have a choice. The price is so expensive. It's either we pirate it or we don't use it at all.

It's kinda remind me of why the President of Romania told Bill Gates that "piracy helped the young generation discover computers". http://techdirt.com/articles/20070201/224452.shtml

Point taken :-)

I don't think that it's a direct correlation. It's more about culture and knowledge. Most of armenians, azerbaijans and moldovans don't even KNOW that software can be bought.

PC by itself is a huge amount of money for them (and many of them get it free from rich relatives that make money in Moscow, Europe or US) and everything that is inside is considered already overpriced.

This reminds me of how international editions of books are sold at discount rates to match local economies. Also, DVD region encoding. There doesn't seem to be any equivalent for commercial software.

If that is true, I'll start questioning why the price of the DVD LOTR Trilogy Extended Editon here, costs us around a third of average monthly salary.

There are other factors at play.

Everything in the US is a lot cheaper too, I'm not surprised then that people decide to actually buy the software.

Curious if anyone has any numbers for software piracy historically speaking? We'll forever be hearing how piracy is destroying companies, so one has to wonder how current piracy rates stack up against previous years.

Historically speaking, software piracy has skyrocketed since the nineteenth century CE. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware#1...)

DEFINITION: The piracy rate is the total number of units of pirated software deployed in 2007 divided by the total units of software installed.

SOURCE: Fifth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study

The ten countries at either end of 107 listed:

  #  1   Armenia:        93%   
  #  2   Moldova:        92%   
  #  3   Azerbaijan:     92%   
  #  4   Bangladesh:     92%   
  #  5   Zimbabwe:       91%   
  #  6   Sri Lanka:      90%   
  #  7   Yemen:          89%   
  #  8   Libya:          88%   
  #  9   Venezuela:      87%   
  # 10   Iraq:           85%  

  # 98   Switzerland:    25%   
  # 99   Austria:        25%   
  #100   Denmark:        25%   
  #101   Belgium:        25%   
  #102   Sweden:         25%   
  #103   Finland:        25%   
  #104   Japan:          23%   
  #105   New Zealand:    22%   
  #106   Luxembourg:     21%   
  #107   United States:  20%   
  
  Weighted average:      59.9%

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