BSA issues channel firms with piracy call to arms

Wardell: It is in resellers’ best business interests to find a stronger voice

Anti-piracy body the Busi­ness Software Alliance (BSA) is calling on the channel to be more proactive in the fight against software piracy.

The plea follows on from the publication of the seven­th annual BSA/IDC Global Piracy Study, which revealed UK piracy levels remained flat at 27 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

The figure marks the UK as having the sixth-lowest levels of software piracy in the world, but equates to a loss of £1bn from the economy each year. The US topped the poll, with a software piracy rate of 20 per cent, while Georgia came last with 95 per cent.

Michala Wardell, chair of the BSA’s UK committee, said the lack of improvement is hitting channel firms the hardest through lost product sales and services revenues.

“The fact the figure has not gone up shows that significant inroads have been made in driving down software piracy in the UK, but more work needs to be done from an education and enforcement perspective,” she said.

The channel also needs to “find a stronger voice”, added Wardell, and demonstrate less reticence when it comes to reporting incidents of software piracy.

“We hear reports about people who have been offered pirated software, but failed to report it,” she said. “It really is in resellers’ best business interests to find a stronger voice and be more proactive when it comes to reporting these incidents.”

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, deputy chairman of the Federation Against Software Theft’s (Fast) Legal Advisory Group, said whistle-blowing is fairly common practice in the channel.

“I would say that 95 per cent of resellers do a good job of helping to police the piracy issue and we receive about 40 anti-piracy reports a month,” he said.

One area in which resellers should be more proactive is driving home to customers the importance of adopting software asset management (SAM) tools, according to Heathcote Hobbins

“We would like organisations to concentrate on the SAM message more, which will help to tackle the problem by going down the lack of licensing route,” he added.

Keith Warburton, chairman of channel trade body the Technology Channels Association (TCA), said that it is vendors, rather than resel­lers, that hold back im­p­rovements in UK piracy rates.

He said that the channel has made repeated attempts to engage with leading software firms to lower piracy rates, but calls for collaboration often go unanswered.

“The response from vendors is rarely of the top-down variety and few seem interested in listening to the concerns of legitimate resellers who are keen to see pirates sent packing,” said Warburton.

Out of the 111 countries studied as part of the IDC/BSA report, the UK was one of 38 regions whose piracy rates showed no change between 2008 and 2009.

The software piracy rate dropped in 54 out of the 111 countries in the study. Adopting practices that have brought piracy down overseas could also help solve the problem in the UK, according to Wardell.

“There are definitely less­ons that can be learned about their approaches to SAM and education,” she said.

“A lot of the success overseas is reliant on intellectual property laws, which is one area in which we are covered well in the UK.”