Mike Masnick of Techdirt demonstrates how the BSA's piracy stats mislead.
Masnick on BSA’s Piracy Stats
July 21, 2008
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Law Bytes
Episode 277: Kate Robertson on the Risks That Lie Behind Canada's Unexpected Signing of the UN Cybercrime Convention
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
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License
There’s that license to use term again. What a spin the BSA spit’s out. The study pretty much includes open source software in their ‘piracy’ statistics. So, a company, say Sony, uses OpenSSL in their SecuROM technology is hurting business.
They are appropriately named; The B.S. Alliance.
Three strikes
One of the linked articles shows one of the dangers of the “three strikes” proposal regarding piracy complaints…
Not surprising
I work in the software industry and I have long found the BSA’s supposed statistics to be a bunch of BS.
This is the same group that used to bulk send letters to small businesses threatening to sue if they didn’t license their installed software WITHOUT even knowing what was installed.