Winning the piracy fight

The global software industry has had to deal with the threat of piracy and its impact for many years. Our country is no different; if anything, it is worse here. The recent outcry by Microsoft Nigeria over the unauthorised reproduction and distribution of its applications in the Nigerian market underscores this problem.

It was in acknowledging the dimensions of piracy that the Nigeria Copyright Commission arrested suspected pirates recently at the popular Computer Village in Ikeja, Lagos following what has become a pattern of frequent raids. In making such arrests, the justified rationale is that piracy hinders innovation. Innovation is ultimately geared towards profit-making, and when ICT applications are pirated, there is no incentive for creativity.

It is taken for granted that piracy is illegal, but it's of a more practical purpose, especially for a developing country like ours, to go beyond just the ethical implications of software piracy to clinically considering its real effects on the growth of the information technology industry in Nigeria.

The fact is, it is not difficult to pirate software, and this has become such a part of global reality that many do it without a second thought to its implications - legal or otherwise. Given the ease with which individuals can obtain cracked copies of software from the internet, it is not surprising that many have taken it on themselves to turn this into an enterprise.

That, for good or bad, is the foundation upon which the famous Computer Village, which has become the centre of technology in the country's commercial capital, is built. It is a place where software such as Microsoft's flagship Windows is sold for less than N500, and where a certified copy of the current version Windows 7 would retail for N32000. It is even easier for the pirates to do business because of the goodwill they seem to enjoy. In the eyes of most consumers, the pirates are doing the noble thing by offering some form of protection from greedy corporations.

In response, software companies have pointed out that consumers can either engage in market advocacy to push down prices, or they can buy cheaper alternatives Unfortunately, that might be a false choice given that most consumers in the Nigerian market have been locked into specific software agreements and would find the total monetary and time cost of migration to other platforms unbearable. There is also a second point to consider, and that is the claim that the big software companies sometimes turn a blind eye to piracy because it helps market share and assists in further locking people into their products. Whether this is true or not, and evidence seems to point to the former, it all feeds into a perception that software owners ultimately want to unfairly cage consumers in for their narrow ends.

Of course, we do not believe piracy to be ethical or appropriate in any way. In a country that has chosen the free market option in order to boost enterprise, application developers have a right to charge freely for their work and sweat. Besides ripping investors off of their toil and income, as has been noted, piracy discourages creativity and erodes consumer confidence - the consequences of which certainly do us no good.

Even better, the informed consumer will note that there are millions of application developers the world over who have forgone earning money from the direct sales of their software, preferring, for varied reasons, to give their software freely under the Free and Open Source model. If consumers do not feel the need to pay for software, then these are freely available for them to download and apply themselves in learning. In fact, it would appear that many who have gone that route usually end up very fanatical about their Open Source products.

Still, while this editorial condemns piracy for whatever reasons, it urges stakeholders in the software business to begin to apply themselves towards ensuring affordable software. It is germane to note, for instance, that Microsoft has a separate pricing model for China, where a product such as Windows 7 is sold in that country for about 30 per cent of its retail price in the United States.

It only makes sense that companies take a country's economic profile into consideration when pricing.

Other factors like market-share and business potential should also weigh in - and, for both, Nigeria offers a wealth of possibilities.

Steps such as reducing the cost of software so it would be within the reach of the average Nigerian are therefore a more effective and sustainable way of combating piracy - and, as an added bonus, they would also help develop the capabilities of Nigerian programmers. Now, that's win-win for everyone.