Piracy: a crime worth trillion dollars!

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Anil Varghese, Director — Original Software Initiative, Microsoft India in an exclusive interaction with Muntazir Abbas of CIOL, speaks on software piracy in India as well as government and channel-driven initiatives to check counterfeit software sales.

Do you think that active government support or/and government-driven programs are highly needed to check counterfeit software menace?

Piracy and counterfeiting activities rob the nation of legitimate R&D investments, valuable jobs, GDP contribution and also result in loss of tax revenues to the government. Global losses from piracy and counterfeiting account for approximately US$1 trillion.

Interestingly, software piracy rates in India have declined from 74 per cent to 65 per cent in the last seven years, a slow drop but still a clear sign of a result of consolidated efforts and encouraging future, with the government’s direct involvement.

While the Government has put in place stringent laws to deter IP infringement and empowering the IP owners, much needs to be done to improve the dedicated IP enforcement infrastructure and manpower in the country.

We also work closely with governments and law-enforcement agencies to build capacity around IP enforcement and IP laws, provide all necessary support to the law enforcement towards a successful prosecution of piracy and counterfeit cases, and help protect customers and honest resellers by investigating individuals, traders and organizations who engage in the illegal production, distribution and/or sale of counterfeit software.

Depending upon the market feedback, which are the states that leads in illegal software sales in the country?

We don’t have any state-specific piracy data, but we know that piracy is the highest in tier-1 cities in terms of the value of losses incurred, including the metros, due to high turnover of PC sales. Microsoft currently engages with customers and partners on education and awareness through the Geo Expansion programmes in over 75 cities.

What are your new channel awareness programs and campaigns to curb piracy in India?

We not only send regular mailers to the channel but also undertake channel association level meetings and conferences in the field to impart education and awareness on various issues related to software piracy. We work closely with more than 15 channel associations in the country and have a very healthy relationship with all of them, and mutually drive various Value of Genuine Software campaigns.

How important is the role of channel in checking piracy in India? Can you talk briefly about your engagement with them?

The partner and reseller community plays an extremely important role in ensuring the sale of original software. This community is the link between software vendors and end consumers - they educate and encourage the end consumer and SMB segment and drive them to purchase original software.

For us, partners and resellers can play a significant role in keeping a continuous check to prevent hard-disk loading of pirated MS software across the country. We have undertaken various long-term, sustained initiatives to create awareness among the reseller community through incentive programs, events, monthly newsletters etc.

We are also working with various channel associations in the country against the menace of piracy by creating a clean, safe and healthy channel reseller ecosystem. We are determined to protect our customer, reseller and partner ecosystem from the threat and losses associated with piracy, and to prevent counterfeiters from taking advantage of innocent victims and gaining an unfair advantage over our honest partners.

Please share some key findings of a recent Microsoft survey.

The major highlights of Microsoft’s Consumer Survey on software counterfeiting in India include: consumers know the difference between genuine and counterfeit software; and that genuine software performs better; consumers are four times more likely to recommend genuine than counterfeit software; consumers think there are risks with using counterfeit software, and 50 per cent of them even don’t believe in counterfeit software.

The findings also revealed that, 79 per cent consumers agree that they need ways to protect themselves from inadvertently buying counterfeit software. Moreover, 82 per cent think that software companies should do more to stop their products from being counterfeited while 76 per cent consumers believe that government should do more to reduce the amount of counterfeit software.