An estimated 19 percent of businesses around the world – about a fifth of the world's business – were product piracy victims over the past two years, with more than half saying they'd been repeat victims, according to a report PricewaterhouseCoopers released September 24.
Most of the piracy – 92 percent, according to the report – were committed outside the companies' organizations, while 15 percent of the companies saying they were piracy victims said they lost between $1 million and $10 million to piracy, said the report, called the Product Piracy Survey 2003.
"I'm not surprised," said Titan Media attorney Gill Sperlein, whose company is involved in trying to resolve peer-to-peer swapping of their copyrighted adult videos. "Technology has made it easier for pirates to share. And then peer to peer networks and software have made it easier for people to do that…nothing on their site(s) indicates that people shouldn't trade anything that doesn't belong to them."
Sperlein said it wasn't easy to figure just how much Titan Media actually loses due to piracy. "But our best estimates show that piracy of our product occurs at a rate of ten times our actual sales," he said. "For each DVD sold, we think there's at least ten counterfeit or pirated copies traded."
The Product Piracy Survey 2003 says most piracy cases concentrate in markets in Central and South America and Africa, with western Europe and the United States reporting only five percent of these crimes. But PricewaterhouseCoopers lead partner of license management practice David Marston said it's still a large, growing problem, particularly in the software industry, "where piracy of intellectual property is so easy and can cause unlimited economic damage.
"Any company which licenses its intellectual property and has global distribution is at a high risk," Marston continued. "There are a number of countries where piracy is culturally accepted, very easy to commit and very difficult to get caught."
He said missing inventory which gets copied and distributed license free is one of the key piracy methods, though not the only one. "What we do know," he said, "is that once the market or channel knows that specific companies are policing their intellectual property rights, this in and of itself can act as a deterrent to piracy."
