Hard Rock Miners Technical Spanish Dictionary Infomine

May we see your license?
Software piracy in Latin America is big business
HE NEXT TIME A POLICE OFFICER ASKS to see your registration (1), you might have to reach
for a copy of your softwareagreement (2), not into your car’s glove compartment. While Latin
America has become the second -fastest-growing market for software in the world (behind
Asia), with the U.S. Department of Commercepredicting an 18% rise over the three next years, the
expansion has brought with it a growing piracy rate that’s a major concern for U.S. software
companies.
The average rate software theft (3) in 16Latin American countries was 78% in 1994, according to
the Business Software Alliance, amounting to more than $1.3 billions (4) in losses, at least 9% of
revenue lost worldwide. In Mexico, which isfast becoming one of the biggest pirate markets in the
world, roughly 80% of all business-software applications currently in use are illegal copies. So why
aren’t we reading about more crackdowns? (5)One reason: operations aren’t easy to spot. Unlike Chine, where entire factories are devoted to
mass-producing software fakes, most pirating in Latin America is conducted at the retail level or inthe workplace. To make systems more attractive to customers, some owners engage in wh at piracy
monitors call “loading”: copying popular applications (…) onto computer hard disks as freebies or atnominal extra cost. (6)
Thus a look is needed a real challenge to protecting intellectual property in the digital age:
eliminating the sense that “no one gets hurt” by illegal copies. After all, thelogic goes, Microsoft
and its sister companies are among the most profitable in the world (7). Why do they need another
check?
That’s a question that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has been answering fornearly four decades, since he
published his famous letter to computer users in the late 1970s. If you don’t pay for our software,
the logic goes (8), we can’t afford to hire programmers to write...