Worldwide piracy of business software products like Microsoft Office declined slightly last year because of better education and more aggressive tactics in stopping Internet piracy, software industry officials say.
The downturn follows two years of increases blamed in part on the rise of distributing illegal copies online, according to a study released yesterday by the Business Software Alliance.
The study estimates that 39 percent of business software products in use last year were not legally obtained. Though the global piracy rate had steadily dropped from 49 percent in 1994, the year of the first study, to 36 percent in 1999, it rose to 40 percent in 2001.
The main source of software piracy remains businesses buying one copy of software legally and then installing it over several computers, said Robert Holleyman, president and chief executive of the alliance.
To combat that, the alliance continued circulating brochures on piracy and conducting amnesty campaigns encouraging businesses to pay for additional copies without threat of civil lawsuits or criminal prosecution, which could lead to fines and even imprisonment.
"Our educational efforts are really paying dividends," Holleyman said.
Last year, the software group also began using an automated software "robot" to find sites for downloading pirated software and computers that share such programs over Kazaa and other file-swapping networks. Previously, investigators looked for such piracy manually.
By region, North America had the lowest piracy rate, at 24 percent, and Eastern Europe the highest, at 71 percent.
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