‘Pirated software costs world $51 billion, says study’
17th September 2010
This is the sort of bullshit that passes for economics these days.
Software ‘licenses’ are transfer payments from users to producers. Every dollar that might have gone to a producer stays with a user instead; there is no ‘loss’. Since the software can be infinitely replicated at trivial cost, any value created by the replication and use of that software is pure rent-seeking by the software creator–we’re not talking widgets, here, where something that took actual physical resources is going to be languishing in idleness (and perhaps get wasted as scrap) if it doesn’t sell.
From a macroeconomic perspective, the result is software in the hands of people who, in many cases, would not have ‘bought’ it because they couldn’t have afforded the economic ‘rent’ being sought. To the extent that the use of that software creates economic activity, it actually increases the overall supply of goods & services; the economy as a whole is larger than it would have been had the software not been ‘pirated’. So it didn’t cost ‘the world’ anything at all; rather, it profited ‘the world’ by the extent of that increase, which would not have taken place had the transfer payment actually occurred.
So whenever you see one of these bullshit industry-sponsored ‘studies’, mentally put the correct ‘ourselves’ in place of the usual ‘the world’ or ‘the industry’, and you’ll see what’s actually happening.