Summary: IDC and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) liaise once again in order to give ammunition to lobbyists of proprietary and copyright conglomerates

THERE is some annual lie coming from partners or front groups of Microsoft. As one author put it: "Today the Business Software Alliance (Wikipedia) released their 2011 ‘Piracy Report’. What a doozy. Their methodology alone really speaks to why they are less and less legit." (source)

This annual lie from the BSA and IDC was rebutted here several times before and Mike Masnick tackles it again:

For the 9th year in a row, the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an organization that mainly represents Microsoft's interest, has put out its ridiculous "Global Software Piracy Study", which argues that tons and tons of software is being pirated, and if only people paid for it, there would be $63.4 billion more going to software companies. We've been criticizing the ridiculously laughable methodology of the report since it began, and even have seen the company that does the research, IDC, admit that the BSA exaggerates what the report actually says. We've done multiple detailed analyses of how the BSA's stats are misleading (or just flat out bogus). And yet, because there are magical numbers involved, the press just loves to parrot the claims without any skepticism.

IDC, being a media entity (IDG), is able to publish those lies over and over again. It's unclear why some good people lend credence to the typical BSA propaganda and this is why year after year we need to repeat ourselves. It's like watching people paying money to Peter Popoff after he was exposed as a scammer so many times. ⬆