MEDIA ADVISORY: REACTION TO BSA/IDC PIRACY REPORT
V.i. Labs’ Software Piracy Data Validates Industry Trends
Losses to software companies breaks the $50 billion level for the first time;
Study validates that software vendors should focus efforts on companies using pirated
software for best chance of revenue recovery
Waltham, Mass. — May 12, 2009 - V.i. Laboratories, (“V.i. Labs”), a leading
provider of piracy business intelligence and software protection solutions, offered
an advisory for ISVs in response to the release of today’s Sixth Annual BSA-IDC Global Software Piracy Study, which
estimates that more than a fifth of all software running on PCs is pirated. The
report also concludes that governments and software companies are making progress
in slowing the illegal use of personal computer (PC) software products, but progress
has stalled in the United States, where losses topple $9 billion.
While global data is useful at the industry level, individual ISVs need to understand
the specific and direct impact of software piracy on their businesses. Global piracy
numbers have increased from 38 to 41 percent: the BSA/IDC research attributes this
to emerging markets and fast growing PC markets, particularly in China and India.
What the report doesn’t address are the best methods for ISVs to recover revenue
once they have been compromised.
Based on V.i. Labs’ independent research of 80 percent of BSA member companies,
we estimate that only 21 percent are using some form of piracy business intelligence to assess their actual problem
and identify the businesses using their unlicensed software.
“Many organizations still believe that their piracy issue is ad hoc and the companies
who use pirated software would not otherwise pay for it,” said Victor DeMarines,
vice president of Products for V.i. Labs. “It’s clear from today’s research that
the best chance for revenue recovery efforts, ISVs need to focus on who is using
the pirated software, rather than focusing on who is pirating their products. Given
the increase of global piracy and specific data we see from our customers, we advise
ISVs to turn their attention to piracy as a lead generation process and a way to
recover revenue from the businesses that are ultimately making a profit at the ISVs’
expense.”
V.i. Labs helps ISVs learn about their specific piracy issue and gather data directly
from infringing organizations to recover license revenue. Thirty percent of the
BSA member companies are high value software vendors who have seen piracy group
release activity grow an average of 155 percent over the last three years. Product
lifecycle management (PLM), engineering, and electronic design automation (EDA)
customers who implemented V.i. Labs’ piracy business intelligence solution (CodeArmor
Intelligence) have reported the following:
- A large PLM vendor generated more than 40,000 actionable infringement leads within
five months of releasing their Service Packs and Beta products.
- Several customer deployments have reported detecting pirated use well ahead of the
actual Piracy Group releases. This phenomenon indicates that end users or even licensed
customers have enough reverse engineering skills and sophistication to emulate the
crack approaches used by the piracy groups to disable licensing. This behavior has
been reported on both software and hardware (USB dongle) based systems. It was estimated
in one deployment that 30 percent of the infringements were generated from cracks
not initiated from piracy groups.
- In all deployments the piracy detection and reporting capabilities were still
available after the piracy group releases.
About V.i. Laboratories (V.i. Labs)
V.i. Labs is the first company to offer Anti-Piracy and Software Protection solutions
that enable companies to recover revenue and protect their software intellectual
property by detecting, reporting, and preventing the misuse of their applications.
Its patented CodeArmor® platform allows software vendors and enterprise organizations
to harden their applications against theft and tampering, and to gain business intelligence
on the unlicensed use of their software to uncover new revenue streams. V.i. Labs
is privately held and is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. For more information, please
visit www.vilabs.com.
©2009 V.i. Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. V.i. Labs, the V.i. Labs
logo, and CodeArmor are trademarks or registered trademarks of V.i. Laboratories,
Inc. All other product and brand names herein are trademarks or registered trademarks
of their respective owners.
Contacts:
Michael Goff
V.i. Laboratories, Inc.
781.398.3451
mgoff[at]vilabs.com
Dan Thompson/Randi Sussman
PAN Communications
978.474.1900
vilaboratories[at]pancomm.com