Mr Ballmer goes to Washington for China pirate gripe
11 other software chums join scrum
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Big name bosses at 12 tech companies are meeting with US lawmakers and White House officials to complain about illegal software copying in China.
According to the Business Software Alliance lobby group, 79 per cent of China's computers ran on counterfeit software in 2009.
"We were seeing progress over a number of years... but that has essentially stalled and the [piracy] rate has been roughly flat for the last three years," BSA President Robert Holleyman told Reuters.
Concerns have been expressed by the likes of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Adobe's Shantanu Narayen about China's planned "indigenous innovation" guidelines on Intellectual Property transfers, that could be bad for the US economy.
The software bosses are meeting with US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Attorney General Eric Holder, among others to gripe about China's pirates.
Holleyman said the BSA is trying to convince US lawmakers to make illegal software copying a top priority in dealing with China.
Despite all that, Microsoft and other key software players still do business in the People's Republic. ®
COMMENTS
Don't do as we do, do as we say...
So it's OK to get iPads made by somebody who gets $140 a month, and then they object when the same people copy their software.
This is just "the market sorting it self out"
(for commentards that don't understand, these companies seem to think that the market solution is to get high tech product made by low paid slaves for sale to high pay westerners and HUGE profit margins, and then complain when the low paid slaves want the same)
Any evil icon will do...
bring it, bring it on...
remember, Microsoft are making all sorts of bluster about Chinese piracy, but they would far rather the Chinese pirate Windows & Office, than have them switch to Linux and/or OpenOffice...
Expect them to get the Chinese to enact a law stating that computers can only be sold with an operating system pre-installed and that in order to claim tax rebate on it for depreciation, it must be commercial software... they won't do it themselves, but will get their goons, the BSA, to do it for them while hiding behind the BSA front... They're currently trying this scam in the Czech Republic:
http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2010-05-26-014-35-NW-BZ-LL
..or just report truthful numbers
Yawn. Every time Microsoft has trundled out their "counterfeit software" complaint in the past, it's turned out that their "counterfeit" figure includes ALL PCs not running licensed copies of Windows. You actually see a fair bit of Linux desktop use in China, so my guess is that this 79% figure is again padded to include non-Microsoft operating systems.
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