War on Piracy Continues on Many Fronts

So complete is Microsoft’s dominance of the desktop that the company’s most serious competition is from illegal versions of its own software. Though recent reports show that piracy is going down-a trend due in part to Microsoft’s aggressive investigative tactics and an extensive publicity campaign-the piracy war continues unabated. As scofflaws make increasing use of the Internet, and as counterfeiters get ever-better tools, Microsoft is fighting back on several fronts. In the next year it will marshal an arsenal of new technological weapons, ranging from license enforcement code in its software to fancy new holographic techniques that will raise the bar for software pirates.

The Cost of Piracy

Piracy, according to the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), stole nearly US$11 billion in revenues from software publishers in 1998, based on estimates from 85 nations. The number does not include certain types of losses, such as lost taxes, job losses, or piracy over the Internet. Given total worldwide software revenue of US$18 billion in 1998, piracy represents nearly 40% of the value of all software used in the world.