Today, software is a multi-billion dollar industry, but when considering
worldwide statistics, it loses almost as much as it earns because
of software piracy. According to the Software Publishers Association,
"25% of all business software in use in 1994 [the most recent
statistics] was pirated." The software industry derives almost
half its revenue from overseas business, but 85% of pirating also
occurs overseas. However, the SPA and the Business Software Alliance
continue to actively fight piracy at home with email and phone
numbers with which to report incidents of piracy. Software companies
of all types have begun to form various alliances to band together
and fight piracy; The Business Software Alliance
is probably the most well known.
The Software Industry spends a great deal of time and effort fighting
software piracy, possibly putting as much time and effort into
this cause as they put into, say, research and development. They
have come up with several different partial solutions to the problem of
piracy, but the multi-billion dollar industry of software piracy continues to grow.