Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures.

At first, it sounds like a good idea. Nanchang, the capital of China's eastern Jiangxi province, is requiring Internet cafe operators to replace pirated server software with legal copies of Red Flag Linux or Windows Server. What's not to like? It's estimated that China has an 82% software piracy rate. Getting businesses to go legal with a native Chinese Linux sounded like a win to me.

Microsoft has lobbied state legislators in the US to introduce a law which would prevent a business selling goods and services if one of its (possibly foreign) suppliers was found to be using pirated Microsoft software.

Alexander Ponosov, director of the school in the village of Sepych, Perm Territory, who has found guilty of installing pirated Windows software in 12 school computers, has changed jobs. He is now engaged in popularizing the free Linux operating system, Window's biggest competitor, after winning a competition held by the Russian Federal Education Agency (Rosobrazovanie) to test Linux in school computers in three regions of the country. Ponosov received wide attention after the local prosecutor charged him with installing pirated software in school computers.

"There is an alternative to pirated software. You don't need to pirate software to use good software. We often read raids of shops and businesses using illegal software. People want to use software, and FOSS is an alternative," said Dr. Giovanni Tapang, member of the Computer Professionals Union and Agham, an organization of Filipino scientists and engineers, in an interview last week.

Software costs money. Some people avoid this cost initially by slyly using an unauthorized version, or what is called pirated software.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs. It turns out that pirated software can also hurt the open-source community.

Looks like there is a movement to link film piracy with terrorism in some effort to get tougher anti-piracy laws introduced.

A frequent meme in piracy trash talking is that piracy is linked to malware (example). If your child is downloading pirated material (so the argument goes) they will be downloading it from a malware infected site and infecting their own computer resulting in poor performance, data loss and ID theft. A variant of this argument is that the downloads expose the kids to evil pornographers.