Intellectual property: Software piracy

The importance of intellectual property protection can vary across outsourcing efforts. It may not be important for small, one-off web design projects, but becomes increasingly important as one moves into proprietary software & web development, business process outsourcing (BPO), and knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).

Software piracy rates are a good proxy of a countries overall adherence to intellectual property rights. The higher the software piracy rates the higher the societal comfort with taking intellectual property and the weaker the government regime for protecting patent and copyrights.

The United States, Canada and Israel have some of the lowest software piracy rates. The large offshore outsourcing locations have poor rates with India and the Philippines close to 70% and China at 80%.

Data below is sourced from the 08 Piracy Study published on May 12, 2009 by the the Business Software Alliance in collaboration with IDC.