Windows OSes Far from No.1 Piracy Victim Spot

Windows operating systems are far from the no. 1 piracy victim position, according to Symantec. In fact, in a ranking put together by the security outfit involving the most pirated programs in accordance to their value, operating systems come in at number 6 ,out of 8.

Symantec discussed software piracy in the Report on the Underground Economy study, considering the phenomenon from the perspective of just the public-domain peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol. The report stretches over a period of three months, from July to September, 2008.

“While analyzing data for the report, Symantec observed software piracy that represented over $83 million (USD) in retail costs. Considering that this was only a small sample of the total software piracy occurring over one protocol over a brief period of time, the value is substantial. A study conducted in 2007 estimated the annual cost of software piracy worldwide to be nearly $40 billion (USD),” revealed Symantec's Teo Adams.

Symantec revealed that no less than 49% of all the instances of pirated software products identified were desktop computer games. Utility applications were on the second position in terms of the volume of pirated products, with just 16%. Symantec explained the gap by emphasizing the entertainment-focus of games and their short life from the perspective of the consumer compared with utilities that were not designed for recreational purposes.

Multimedia applications came in third place with 11%, followed by console games with 9%, other applications with 5%, business productivity applications with 5%, operating systems with 4% and audio recording applications with 1%.

“The assumption from that might then be that the desktop game business sector would be the most affected financially; however, the multimedia applications category (which includes photo editors, 3D animation applications, and HTML editors) accounted for substantially more of the total piracy costs observed than desktop games, despite a substantially lower volume of pirated files. This is because the average manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for multimedia applications is typically much higher than those of desktop games, $1,300 (USD) for multimedia compared to just $50 (USD) for desktop games. Thus, of the $83 million estimated total for software piracy observed, multimedia applications accounted for over $53 million of that and desktop games for just over $8 million,” Adams stated.