Covering much of the same material as “Global Software Piracy” in the September 2000 issue of CACM [1], this article focuses more regionally. It offers limited data (243 business students in Hong Kong were surveyed), to arrive at the obvious conclusion that software piracy happens because of the perceived minimal risk in stealing software that, unlike hardware, rises in price over time, and where the added cost is often more for bloat than for bug fixes. The authors’ survey data implicate cost as the driving issue.

Given cost as a key issue, a suggestion from the authors of the September article is worth repeating--software manufacturers should adopt price discrimination policies, for example, indexing the price of software to the per-capita GNP in countries where they sell their software. This discourages piracy, and as consumers in these countries buy software to use productively and the GNP levels rise, manufacturers can raise their prices accordingly. With such changes, piracy is discouraged and profits are increased, a state of affairs in the best interests of all.

As Moores and Dhillon correctly point out, the Software and Information Industry Association, which leads the industry fight against software piracy, should get its members to pay more attention to cost issues for software in different markets around the world.