Alliance urges police to step up raids on software pirates

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 05/27/2006 12:24 PM

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A group of businesses against software piracy is urging the police to continue efforts to clamp down on the distributors and buyers of illegally copied programs in Jakarta.

Despite the thousands of titles still available on local markets in the capital, the Business Software Alliance believes police raids on distributors and businesses are an important deterrent in the fight against piracy.

This year, police have conducted dozens of raids on software retailers and companies -- the last on April 18 at Ambassador Mall in Jakarta, where the police confiscated around 1,500 pirated CDs from sellers.

""We are very grateful to the Indonesian government for their efforts and hard work in protecting intellectual property rights by conducting raids and other law enforcement activities,"" BSA representative, Farouk Cader, said at the National Police Headquarters last week.

The raids were proof the government was committed to educating consumers that software piracy was unacceptable, he said.

According to a police report, Ambassador Mall and the Ratu Plaza shopping complex are two main centers for pirated software in the country. Glodok in Kota is another.

Although police have seized more than 10,000 CD and DVDs from Ambassador Mall and Ratu Plaza this year, including titles copied from big-name producers like Microsoft, Symantec, Borland, Adobe, Cisco Systems and others, that number is still a drop in the ocean compared to the total amount of disks believed to be on the market.

BSA Asia regional director Tarun Shawney said while Indonesia had only recently joined the global movement to protect intellectual property rights, the country had made significant progress in recent years.

""In all the raids in 2003, nobody was arrested. In 2004, many people were arrested but none were convicted. In 2005, seven shops were raided; every person was arrested and then some were convicted and sentenced to prison,"" Tarun said.

Those found guilty of pirating or distributing illegal software under the 2002 Copyright Law risk five years imprisonment or up to Rp 500 million in fines.

In the following months, police and the BSA would conduct raids on around 20 companies here believed to be using pirated software in their offices.

With an estimated 87 percent of all software installed in computers here illegal, Indonesia has the second-worst rate of piracy in the Asia Pacific next to Vietnam.

According to the BSA, Indonesia's software industry -- worth a total of around US$1.1 billion in 2003 -- could more than double in value to US$2.4 billion if the piracy rate was reduced by only 10 percentage points.

However, with only a few companies producing local software in the country, most of this revenue would likely flow overseas.

Meanwhile, the illegal trade in pirated programing has become sophisticated enough for many vendors here to have electronically inventorized their stocks to better-track consumer preferences when they order from wholesalers.

Industry observers believe piracy is likely to stay a problem in the region until prices for original software come down to affordable levels or -- even less likely -- a failsafe copy protection system is devised. (04)

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