57 Percent of PC Owners Admit to Pirating Software

A new report issued by the Business Software Alliance says that 57 percent of all owners of a PC admit to pirating software.

The report might suggest that a large portion of pirated content is linked to video games because young males are the category that is seen as the main piracy offenders.

The Business Software Alliance claims that 63.4 billion dollars (49.7 billion Euro) were lost by the information technology industry because of piracy in 2011, which is a significant increase over the 58.8 billion dollars reported for 2010 (46.1 billion Euro).

China is currently the biggest market for pirated content.

The report also shows that those who pirated software actually own more than other categories, which might suggest that piracy is not necessarily linked to economic reasons.

Piracy has been repeatedly cited as one of the main reasons why big publishers and developers have limited the number of video games that were launched on the PC.