Software piracy plagues Latvia

  • 2002-05-16
  • Timothy Jacobs
RIGA

It is almost funny how easy it is to buy pirated software in Riga.

Go to the central market in Riga, and you will be hard pressed to find a single legitimate vendor. The more daring can take a trip to the infamous Latgale market for their pirated software. If you happen to work in the center of Riga, you may be fortunate enough to have your own personal vendor as many sell door-to-door.

But software manufacturers like Microsoft and Adobe aren't laughing.

The Latvian branch of the Business Software Alliance announced March 13 that after two years of progress in reducing the amount of pirated business software used in offices throughout the country the situation has leveled off.

According to the BSA, which is an international anti-piracy organization funded by a consortium of software manufacturers, 77 percent of the business software being used in Latvia is illegally copied.

Niluta Marcinkus, the organization's executive director, said software piracy in Latvia amounts to a loss of about 55 million lats ($87.3 million) per year to software manufacturers and about 15 million lats to the government's tax coffers.

"People have to understand that software piracy doesn't only hurt the software manufacturers, it hurts the consumers too," said Marcinkus. "The money that manufacturers lose to piracy is money that can't be re-invested in the research and development of new and better software."

Steps to bring the issue to the forefront in Latvia, including an annual protest by the music business, they have proven largely ineffective.

Eastern Europe is the world's biggest market for pirated software, according to the BSA. While none of the Baltic countries is among the world's 10 worst offenders, the current levels are shameful.

"We are pretty much on the same level as other Eastern European countries but are better than Russia and the Ukraine," said Pilkku Aasma, the anti-piracy manager for software giant Microsoft's Baltic operations.

"Latvia and Lithuania lag behind Estonia, probably because Estonia's IT sector developed more quickly and because they started developing their own products."

The BSA has been working closely with the police to stamp out software piracy. "We inform them if we know that someone is using an illegal program, and if they find information that we would be interested in when they make a raid, they tell us and we can ask them to prosecute it," said Marcinkus.

The organization has also set up a hotline where people can anonymously turn in companies that are using pirated software and where companies can find out if they are using pirated software and how to go about legalizing it.

Still, the BSA doesn't believe enough is being done to combat software piracy.

"The laws are strong enough, but there isn't enough of a police presence to enforce them," said Marcinkus. "The problem is that the economic police aren't doing enough. They have neither the manpower nor the budget to combat the problem."

The software most pirated is Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and programs created by Tilde, a Riga-based software developer that produces translation programs from English to all three Baltic languages. "The Business Soft-ware Alliance is doing what it can, but it can only inform society about the problem and propose changes in legislation and kindly ask the police to do their job." said Uldis Dzenes, the managing director of Tilde.

Eriks Zaics, head of the economic police unit responsible for combating piracy, admits that his department faces difficulties.

"We do regular raids on different sites including the markets, but the software pirates have intricate systems set up to avoid getting caught, so our job is not easy," Zaics said.

Both the police and the BSA say that a lot of the pirated software comes from Russia and the Ukraine.

"The CDs are transported in blank cases, so it can be difficult to tell if there is anything on them or not," said Marcinkus. "Although Estonia has succeeded a few times in catching smugglers, as of yet, Latvia has yet to catch a single shipment of pirated software at the border."

Dzenes doesn't think that the sale of software in the markets in Riga is the biggest problem with piracy in Latvia. "The problem is that many people think that because they can get software for free they are allowed to use it."