Last year the Business Software Alliance (BSA) released its annual report on software piracy for 2009 which calculated that the commercial value of unlicensed software that founds its way into global markets last year totaled $51.4 billion. This figure represents a global rise in software piracy from 41% in 2008 to 43% in 2009.
The BSA traces the stimulus for this increase in software piracy to be largely due to the exponential growth in the PC and software markets in fast growing / high piracy markets such as Brazil, China and India.
The BSA’s study can be found here on their Website. To combat this growing threat to copyright and trademark owners in the software industry, the Whitehouse has committed itself to fighting these criminal violations of trademark and copyright-infringement. Right now the Obama administration is taking steps in an effort to protect intellectual property owners from copyright and trademark infringement. The Obama administration is working across agencies and nations to stem the flow of civil and criminal violations which in 2009 cost the worldwide technology industry $51 billion in software piracy alone.
