The Business Software Alliance Would Like You To Stop Pirating Software

The Business Software Alliance wants you to stop pirating software. A fair request, sure, particularly coming from the BSA. As such, the group has updated its “Faces of Internet Piracy” Web site to include three more “good guys,” people who are negatively affected by unscrupulous pirates worldwide. Take Jason Calhoun, of Rosetta Stone, the language learning software. You pretty much cannot throw a stone online and not run into pirated copies of Rosetta Stone all over the place.

Calhoun explains how, back in the day, he used to actually be a software developer for Rosetta Stone, but now he spends all his time FIGHTING PIRACY~!

Here, piracy is divided into a few separate categories: plain ol’ Internet piracy (downloading ISOs and the like); unauthorized selling of pirated copies; and, well, that’s it.

So, two categories. Sorry.

Calhoun makes one point that I’d like to copy verbatim: pirating software may not always be safe. You may think you’re downloading an ISO of whatever, completely unaware that there’s a fun trojan in there waiting to strike!

What happens when you pirate an operating system? You can’t get software updates. At least that’s how it works with Windows these days, and Windows is pretty much the only operating system that has to fight malware on a daily basis. (Not to say that Macs don’t get malware either, but it’s not a 24/7, constant struggle.) And if you don’t properly keep your system up to date, you’re not only putting yourself in danger, you’re also putting the entire Internet in danger.

The BSA could probably do a better job of not casting the problem of Internet piracy into something as binary as “good guy” and “bad guy,” but you have to expect that type of thinking from the organization.