Source Upside
To most people it's not a big deal. Nearly everyone has occasionally bootlegged a diskette or two. With most PCs shipping with CD-write technology, making copies of software -- even big programs -- is child's play. And with Internet connections getting faster all the time, bootleg software is increasingly being traded across the Web. The logic is simple -- why pay $100 for a piece of software that you can download for free? That kind of thinking has led to the growth of a multibillion dollar problem, according Rebecca Bosley, the FBI's supervisory special agent for Boston's computer crime squad. "People don't perceive software piracy as a crime," explains Bosley, "but the economic impact of software piracy is far greater than for traditional crimes such as bank robbery." The Software & Information Industry Association estimates that $11 billion of bootlegged software is distributed every year , representing the loss of more than a hundred thousand jobs worldwide, most of them in high-tech areas like Boston. Software piracy drains the Massachusetts economy of almost a billion dollars every year, costing the state some 4,300 high-tech jobs, according to statistics provided by the Boston office of Microsoft. In 1997 alone, the state lost $240 million in wages and salaries, $600 million in retail sales, and close to $11 million in tax revenue that could have contributed to state and local improvement projects. |
And the sales go still up...
