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CCIA: Seriously, BSA report BS: If John Gantz, the IDC researcher who led The Business Software Alliance's latest Global Piracy Study, was hoping to have the last word on the controversy that's arisen around his research (see "BSA report BS, redux"), he hoped in vain. Gregory Minchak, Director of External Affairs for the Computer & Communications Industry Association wrote in yesterday to take issue with Gantz's comments and offer a withering critique of the BSA piracy report. His note is quite long, but it adds substantially to the discussion, so I'm publishing it below. John, I saw with interest John Gantz's (IDC) response to your characterization of the BSA piracy report. Having read what little information is available from BSA and IDC, I can only say that getting "the rest of the story" is going to be difficult. BSA and IDC have not yet opened up the data and methodologies for public inspection as CCIA and CEA have requested. Anything short of that, it is impossible to determine what the published numbers really mean. We have concerns about the quality of the study based on the publicly known information. For example: *The survey specifies neither margin of error nor confidence levels for any data presented in the study. Even freshman statistics students know that no statistical sampling is trustworthy without those key indicators. *IDC interviewed 5,600 people in 15 countries to determine patterns of individual software use, then extrapolated those results to every country in the world. Authors give no indication as to how they picked the number interviewed nor the countries they represent for the survey. CCIA believes that 5,600 respondents is insufficient to represent the millions of PC users worldwide. *The report is silent as to the effect that law has on piracy rates. For instance, authors make no attempt to distinguish between estimates made for countries with strong intellectual property regimes such as the United States, and those with lax enforcement, such as Mexico. |
*Like all forms of human activity, piracy doesn't occur uniformly within a country - it varies from place to place. How did IDC project a country's internal sectional rate to an entire nation and consequently, in some cases, across a global region? *Throughout the study, BSA uses IDC's proprietary data for the number of software and PC shipments in a given country and a given region. How is this data tracked and what is its margin of error? What kind of regional "analysis" is performed? How does IDC account for software that is freely distributed with the permission of its developer? *IDC only tracks PC data for 60 of the 90 countries the study covers. For the remaining 30 countries they estimate the numbers by a rest-of-region model. The study makes no attempt to account for more than 100 countries around the globe, nor does it explain how the modeling was performed. BSA has relied on past, equally vague surveys to assure passage of increasingly draconian copyright laws. More recently, these numbers were used to justify passage of a $10 million Dept. of Justice appropriation for IP enforcement against citizens. The survey is also being used to support BSA's efforts in favor of the Induce Act. As you and your readers know, this Senators Hatch and Leahy's bill that attempts to target individuals who "induce" copyright infringement. Unfortunately the bill is so broad that it will hold accountable the financial backers of new technologies, even if they have no knowledge of present or future infringing uses of the technology. We also believe that it will give the entertainment industry veto power of any product or service by which it feels threatened. Sorry for the long note, but with these numbers being used to justify such overly broad and wide-ranging legislation, we felt compelled to respond. Regards, Gregory Minchak |
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