A report from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) said that although unlicensed software in the UK has dropped by two percentage points in the last couple of years, it’s still costing the industry a fortune.
The BSA canvassed a number of IT managers, enterprises and ordinary people and claimed “an alarming number” of people still use unlicensed software.
The industry in the UK is losing out to the tine of £1.3 billion a year, the BSA claimed.
But the UK is not the worst offender – in Europe the amount is £1.4 billion.
The BSA claimed that 39 percent of software worldwide is still unlicensed and some of the sectors including banking, insurance and security are the biggest of offenders.
Asia Pacific figures dwarf those for the UK and France, with an estimated 61 percent using unlicensed software, while Central and Eastern Europe amounted to 58 percent and the Middle East and Africa at 57 percent.
The good boys and girls are in North America, where the figure is only 17 percent even though the net commercial value amounts to $10 billion.
