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Software Piracy Statistics Watch

Software Piracy
Risk Assessment

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Research Report

Bill Gates Calls Out China On Software Piracy In Business

  • "What's unique to China is you have large businesses using software without paying for it. Super-profitable big businesses. Take two of the five most-profitable businesses in China: they don't pay for their software."

V.i. Labs Software Piracy Risk Assessment Report -
September 2009

  • File hosting services are a significant piracy distribution threat: 100% of the pirated product releases surveyed were available on Rapidshare and 67% were available on two or more file hosting service providers.

V.i. Labs Software Piracy Risk Assessment Report -
July 2009

  • The top five piracy groups (out of 212) contributed 59% of the cracked releases in the research sample.

Top 10 US Industries With Highest Reports of Software Piracy in 2008 (BSA)

  1. Manufacturing
  2. Sales/Distribution
  3. Service (general category)
  4. Financial Services
  5. Software Development
  6. IT Consulting
  7. Medical
  8. Engineering
  9. School/Education
  10. Consulting

Sixth Annual BSA and IDC Global Software Piracy Study

  • One-Fifth of PC software in United States is pirated
  • Worldwide losses grew in 2008 by 11 percent to $53 billion

SIIA Anti-Piracy Year on Review 2008

  • Most cases pursued by SIIA represent relatively larger companies – the average number of staff is over 804 with average annual sales of nearly $90 million

V.i. Labs’ Research Offers Insight to High-Value Software Applications and Piracy Activity (August 2008)

  • V.i. Labs evaluated 17 leading EDA and PLM vendors, including Agilent, ANSYS, Autodesk, Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, Dassault, The MathWorks, Mentor Graphics, National Instruments, PTC, Solidworks, and UGS/Siemens
  • Discovered nearly 1,000 crack releases in the last three years alone, with 79 percent of those being PLM or CAD-related, and 21 percent being EDA-related
  • The average time-to-crack for PLM vendors was 30 days (the point in time where the piracy group has produced a quality crack release of a vendor’s new software version)

PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007 Technology Licensing Marketplace Study

  • Consensus estimates seriously miscalculate the impact of licensing revenue leakage
  • Almost half of the companies surveyed (48 percent) do not have a plan for recovering lost licensing revenue
  • Forty percent of technology licensors do not conduct any compliance audits

PricewaterhouseCoopers "Economic crime: People, culture and controls" (The 4th biennial Global Economic Crime Survey)

  • Of the 41% of IP infringement cases that involved a perpetrator located overseas, 44% of those involved a perpetrator from China.

UBS Investment Research: Could the Piracy Trade Winds Be Changing Course? (May 2006)

  • Estimated average piracy rate for the large enterprise market in China is approximately 70%
  • Estimated average piracy rate for the SMB market in China is approximately 90%