Piracy, Serious Hindrance to Software Development in ChinaA study report shows that the growth rate of China's software industry is far beyond the average rate of that in the world. However, alongside the development some major factors have severely hindered the sound growth of the industry, software piracy being the major stumbling block on the way.Investigation shows that China's software sales volume increased to 17.6 billion yuan from 460 million during the period of 1991-1999. If plus information service, the sales volume hit 41.45 billion yuan in 1999 due to the increasing demand of software market, government support and low cost of labor. Therefore, software industry enterprises are very bullish about their perspectives. However, 26% of the enterprises are of the opinion that piracy constitutes the biggest barrier for their development, and 19.6% say they are lack of money. The piracy of software is mainly expressed in following ways: illicit copy and sale by intimating other software, loading software onto the computers by hardware dealers without authorization before they sell them, and online sale or uploading software without authorization, thus causing the terminal users to infringe on the copyright. Software enterprises say that "ultimate user piracy" proves to be the most harmful to software industry, followed by the "manufacturing software piracy" and "piracy in distribution of software". |
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