The
Jerusalem Post, Internet Business Article,
May
26th, 2000:
Software-piracy rate drops
By
Buzzy Gordon
JERUSALEM (May 26) - The
Business Software Alliance (BSA), a US-based watchdog
organization, issued its 1999 Global Software Piracy Report
this month, analyzing practices of computer-software
copyright infringement worldwide.
Israel succeeded in lowering the rate of piracy from 48
percent in 1998 to 44% last year, the fifth consecutive year
that such a decline has been registered - and down
significantly from 78% back in 1994.
Moreover, Israel has the lowest piracy rate in the Middle
East and North Africa, including the vastly wealthy oil-rich
Arab nations of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and all the
Gulf States. Oman, for example, has double the the piracy
rate of Israel, reaching 88%, the same as Lebanon.
This progress notwithstanding, earlier this month the
United States reiterated in its US Trade Representative
(USTR) Special 301 Decision that Israel would remain on the
US government's priority watch list targeting privacy
offenders.
"Israel [is] among the countries that have very
serious intellectual property problems... requiring the
focus of increased bilateral attention," said USTR Charlene
Barshevsky in an official statement.
Barshevsky noted that Israel had indeed passed tougher
legislation against piracy and beefed-up enforcement, but
insisted that "Israel remains a key distribution hub in a
multi-country network (including Western Europe and Russia)
for pirated optical media product, much of which is still
manufactured in Israel."
Attorney Ami Fleisher, the BSA representative in Israel,
said that Israel should not be compared to other countries
in the Middle East, but to other westernized and
computer-oriented countries like Germany, the UK, and the
US, whose piracy rates are in the 25% to 27% range. And
Attorney Eran Soroker, whose law firm of Soroker Agmon
pursues violators of software copyrights, stressed that the
dollar losses caused by piracy in Israel have been on the
increase year after year, accounting for a record $72.5
million in losses to software developers in 1999.
However, Western European nations like the Netherlands
and Italy have similar or worse piracy rates than Israel,
and accounted last year for dollar losses to intellectual
property owners of $264m. and $421m. respectively.
Even the vaunted examples of Germany and the UK cost the
software industry $680m. and $652m. respectively, while
losses from this type of theft in the US amounted to a
whopping $3 billion, the worst single-country offender on
the BSA list. Israel did not come close to making the top 25
list of offenders.
