One In Four Say Pirated Software Used In The Office

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October 12, 2004 (1:52 PM EDT)

By TechWeb Technology News

One in four American business professionals say that they work in an office where pirated software is in play, a survey released Tuesday by an industry group said.

The Business Software Alliance ((BSA) -- a group of tech leaders including Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Cisco, and others -- focuses on anti-piracy issues, and often announces major deals with enterprises coming clean on illegal software.

From the survey it sponsored, it shouldn't have trouble finding new targets.

The poll of over 1,500 architects, accountants, engineers, graphic designers, and workers in the financial services sector noted that 23 percent admitted some illegal software is used in their offices, and estimated that almost half -- 46 percent -- of the software used by their professions was pirated.

Architects were the most likely to bet that some colleagues used illegal software (60 percent) while graphic designers were the surest that their profession toed copyright laws and licensed every copy used (only 24 percent said that some software in their profession was pirated).

The high numbers of those admitting piracy's in their workplace runs counter to other findings of the survey, the BSA said. An overwhelming majority of 89 percent, for instance, said that software piracy "is a risk no business can afford to take" and an almost-as-high 79 percent said that they wouldn't want to work for a company that uses unlicensed software.

Along with the survey's release, the BSA on Tuesday also announced it had settled with 25 companies nationwide to the tune of $2.2 million in fees collected for using illegal software.

Among them were a hotel in New York City ($147,500), an Atlanta pest control company ($225,000), and a St. Paul, Minn.-based manufacturing firm ($199,174).