The Business Software Alliance, an industry trade group that represents many software vendors, has made stamping out software piracy a major initiative. To that end, it commissions an annual survey of global piracy, performed by IDC. There's not a whole lot of information about the methods employed in producing those numbers, so it's difficult to know how reliable they are in absolute terms. But said figures may be valuable for detecting trends, in which case the news is good for the BSA: although piracy remains substantial, it isn't growing at the rates it once was, and many industrialized countries have seen rates of piracy drop below 25 percent.
First, a bit about those methods. IDC makes its money in part by tracking trends in the computer industry, and performs annual surveys of the markets in those countries, targeting vendors, end users, and so on. In over 60 countries, it enlists local analysts to provide further details on the market; the handful of countries it has limited numbers for are dealt with by extrapolating conditions from similar countries (i.e., Kazakhstan's numbers might have been produced by looking at other former Soviet states with emerging markets). That's an approach that was recently slammed by the Government Accountability Office.
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