Anger after Canada guesstimated software piracy figures

For decades piracy numbers have been freely quoted by studios, software companies and intellectual property lobbyists, yet few have questioned the accuracy of these numbers, how they were obtained or how they were interpreted.

This now looks set to change thanks to Dr. Michael Geist, a Canadian law professor who holds the Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottowa.

After asking some tough questions and doing some investigating, Geist discovered that the piracy numbers quoted by the Canadian Business Software Alliance (BSA) were based on a hunch rather than any actual surveys of the Canadian public.

It turns out that the BSA (and the research company who was commissioned to create the report) used educated guesswork that appears not be based on any actual data.

According to the research company commissioned by the BSA, the countries typically surveyed represented more volatile economies which tend to traditionally have high rates of piracy.

Because past research from mature markets with low levels of piracy have shown that these more mature markets tend to have predictable software usage patterns, low piracy countries like Canada were not surveyed and numbers were estimated based on historical data.

With the BSA traditionally seen as the definitive source of piracy statistics for Canada, this discovery has attracted anger from all sides of the copyright debate.

Unfortunately the BSA also used these numbers to back claims that Canada has a serious piracy problem and this also appears to have added additional rage to an already controversial situation.

Looking beyond the short term controversy surrounding this issue in Canada, Geist's discovery also raises serious questions about the piracy statistics stats quoted globally.

Whilst piracy data gives both the media and politicians plenty of numbers to quote, the lack of transparency around how piracy information is researched stands to potentially damage the credibility of any future claims around rates of piracy.