Yet another Opinion about Piracy Part 1

Written by Noel Nuguid | 99 views | No Comment
June 29th, 2008

Being an Anti-Piracy advocate for around 4 years now, I think its time for me to actually discuss about what is my perception on piracy, the possible roots of piracy in the Philippines and my own suggestions on how to help reduce piracy in the Philippines.

This article will be the first of three articles on Yet another view on Piracy in Philippines. In this series, I will be:

• Painting a Picture of Piracy in the Philippines
• Discussing and Disecting some of the many reasons behind piracy
• Suggesting and voicing out some of my opinions on how to reduce Piracy

Painting a Picture of Piracy in the Philippines

Piracy in the Philippines like any other country in the world is very prevalent. It has come to the point that vendors actually peddle pirated movies, audio’s cd and software in the streets themselves rather than being discreete about it. In fact, people actually brag about them patronizing pirated movies. Some even are proud to show of their entire DVD collection of pirated movies. Although there is no denying to there people who ARE buying legit items, how many people do you know that actually have a firm stand in NOT buying pirated movies, audio CD’s or software? Consider the following scenarios:

• Scenario # 1, I am online one evening when a friend in the medical profession suddenly comes online in yahoo messenger so I started a friendly conversation and found out that she was downloading the latest Grey’s Anatomy season FROM Limewire. Now I dont know about you but I believe that 9 out of 10 of the movies and music files in P2P networks are pirated.

  So I made a friendly question, “That’s piracy isn’t it?”. My friend defensively said, “Hindi ah, for personal use ko lang at hindi ko naman ibebenta (Of course not, this is for personal use only and besides, I wont sell it).”. Nger… Ok, another way of NOT defining Piracy — If its personal use, its ok to download from the Internet, even if you’re not paying for it.

• Scenario # 2, how about in the school setting? Well picture this, a lot of schools whether elementary, high school and even colleges now offer computer classes aimed to making their students competitive in the IT industry. So they load the classroom computers with Microsoft, Adobe and other industry standard software and teach these in their curriculum. Nothing wrong with that, but at the end of the day, when these students go home or when they graduate. do you think they can afford these software so they can continue using it?

  True, the training in school will allow these students to be comptetive in finding a job. But nowadays, would you really want to work for a company and have yourself tied to it, rather than going on your own and build your own business? And if you do start on your own business, how much do you have to invest in just getting the right software at the right price?

• Scenario # 3, We all know that a lot of businesses use pirated software. From the single entrepreneurship business to mega sized corporations, Pirated software is everywhere. Her are some examples that I have encountered personally:

  • Startup Company: I got on board as an IT specialist, and the first thing I noticed is that two out of 25 computers have licensed Windows XP installed and all of them are running Microsoft Office Professional 2003. Plus selected workstations dedicated for Web Designers and developers are using unlicensed Macromedia and Adobe products for Web development work.
  • Big Established Company: With a big company, you’d think you wont come across any pirated software. Well almost, this company is quite established in many fields and is starting to get into a web business. Yes it has licenses for the operating system and productivity office suite. but if you study the operations a bit closer you will find out that most of the major tools need for web development (Adobe applications) used by its employees are not licensed. This is worsen when some of the clients use certain applications that are not used by the company like Corel draw for vector images.
  • Entreprenuers: Here you will find Internet Cafe’s, Freelancers and others. Owners of these tiny businesses needs to stay compettive but are not willing to invest in the right software to be software compliant. This also happens for many home-based businesses.

So many ways, piracy has been observed as the norm in the Philippines. Although I violently disagree, we all know that to resolved this problem, we must know the reasons behind it. I will be sharing my views on the reasons why people get involved in piracy in my next article.