The Business Software Association of Australia has announced that the time for warnings is over. It says illegal copying of software costs its members $400 million a year in Australia. It will now spend 75 per cent, rather than 50 per cent, of its Budget on litigation, cutting education from 50 to 25 per cent.
It will raid premises under what are called Anton-Piller court orders which enable the raiders to seize evidence, which can mean seizing computers. The BSAA is willing to pay a $2500 reward to people who dob in a pirate.
On its face it seems that the software publishers are like the British Navy, patrolling the seas and upholding the law by boarding parties if necessary, and that the copiers are flying the Jolly Roger.
Well, the British Navy has a long history of defending unjustifiable monopolies which enrich the few at the expense of the many. Now the software publishers are self-righteously going on the warpath to defend the plunder they make under a far too-generous monopoly.
The copyright monopoly which runs until 50 years after the author’s death, was originally there to give authors (and their children) reasonable return for their written work, and as the works of, say, Dickens and Wordsworth show, to ensure the public ultimately gets a return when the works come into the public domain.
Technological gadgetry, like compressors and calculators, on the other hand, only gets a monopoly for 16 years under the patent law. After that the invention goes into the public domain.
By historic accident software comes under copyright rather than patent law. Copyright gives software protection for at least 50 years. In effect, that means computer software will never come into the public domain in a meaningful way because the technology will have moved on by then and be worthless to the public, unlike the words of Wordsworth.
In a fast-moving world, Parliament should revisit patent and copyright law and ask, why do we grant the monopoly? Surely, it is to foster creativity, give a reasonable return to the intellectual creator and to ensure the intellectual creation becomes public property. That is the quid pro quo; in return for a period of a government-protected monopoly the public ultimately benefits.
That reasoning has been warped with computer software. The courts and parliament between them have put it in the wrong category for the wrong reason. Ideally, software should have a monopoly for, say, five or 10 years and then should go into the public domain.
As it is, however, the software companies abuse their monopoly by charging outrageous prices. For a manual and a few discs, $1000 is not unusual. That sort of price for the legal product only encourages the illegal. It has been the same throughout history whenever governments have granted unjustified monopolies, whether in corn, opium, software or whatever.
I am not arguing for open slather. Intellectual property such as software should be protected, but not for the length of time it is now. About five or seven years would be reasonable. So Windows, for example, would not be in the public domain yet, but DOS 3.2 and Word 4 would be.
The software publishers would object, not because they want to sell the five-year-old software, but because many poor users (students, charities, sports bodies not favoured by Mrs Kelly etc) would prefer old, free software to the hugely expensive new software, and thus the demand for new software would fall.
One of the ironies is that software over-pricing through abuse of monopoly power has caused so much illegal copying that a large lucrative legal market in “guidebooks” (de-facto manuals) has been spawned to provide copiers who hitherto had only been able to copy the raw program. Copiers can now legally buy a manual for a $500 software package published by mainstream book publishers for say $50. If the software monopolists priced their product more reasonably they would get this market back because people would prefer the official manual if it was not so outrageously priced.
The Australian Parliament, Government and courts have been conned by the software publishers. They have given them wide powers and inserted criminal provisions into the Copyright Act to protect their monopoly. Worse still the organisation which calls itself the Business Software Association of Australia is a pressure group of American publishers and the excessive profits will go back to the US, mostly into the pocket of the world’s richest man, Bill Gates.