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Monday, September 20, 2004
Low price not reason for rampant CD piracy
WHY do people buy pirated software, movies or music? The most common reason given is that licensed software is expensive.
However, stakeholders in a forum on intellectual property rights protection said this argument was fallacious, and warned of harm to those who subscribed to it.
Wilson Ng, president of e*Sprint Software, gave the example of a popular singer in China—where piracy is rampant—who went out of his way to make sure his albums were cheap, so everyone could afford to buy a licensed copy.
He set the price of his album at only 10 yuan, or about P90, which is much lower than the normal cost of licensed music.
But two weeks later, he found pirated CDs of his music selling for just eight yuan.
Ng concluded that it was not price alone that was driving consumers to patronize pirated CDs, but an utter lack of recognition or respect for intellectual property.
“We have to start valuing intellectual property if we want to develop our (local) movie, software and music industry,” he told participants at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel.
Losses
As it is, homegrown companies are not motivated to create new software or music because they lose a lot in potential revenues to people simply copying their music or software without paying them for it.
Tarun Sawney, director for anti-piracy in Asia of Business Software Alliance (BSA), also warned that software piracy’s “short-term gains can lead to long-term pains.”
He was stumped why companies that relied heavily on information technology, such as outsourcing companies, refused to pay the right price for such technology when their business depended on it.
He acknowledged that the software might be expensive, but that it was mostly a one-off cost, and a very small one at that compared to the price a company would have to pay if raided, and found to have used pirated software.
Raid
He gave the example of a successful company whose computers were seized during a BSA raid and all of whose employees are now potentially out of a job.
On questions of why software companies do not simply give discounts to government agencies or to those countries that can’t afford to pay so much for software, Sawney said, “The cost of software is standard all over the world. If they sell software cheaper in one country,” many countries that allow parallel imports will soon have some players undercutting all businesses.
He explained that Microsoft sells cheaper in Thailand only because the software giant developed software there in the Thai language, and therefore the risks are contained.
Sawney instead urged companies to take advantage of software companies’ volume licenses. CTL
(September 20, 2004 issue)
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