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“Ignorance of software piracy can no longer be excused”

— FILE Photo: Paul Noronha

Ravi Venkatesan: “Every time somebody invents a better mouse-trap, criminals figure out how to break that. … It will be hard to stop the determined pirate.”

Your thesis is: the software industry in India is getting virtually decimated because of piracy. Is it an alarmist view?

No. India is the IT [information technology] powerhouse; all our successes are [in] exporting software services. There are no successful [Indian] software companies serving the domestic market, with the exception of Tally. All the others are multinationals who sell in India.

Almost all developing countries tend to be high-piracy markets.

Nobody has zero piracy. Where they would be in the 20 and 30 per cent range, ours is in the 70s, China is in the 80s.

There is an organisation called PSA which keeps track of these things; NASSCOM endorses these figures. Most recent estimate [for India] is 72 per cent.

The way we, Microsoft, are trying to address this problem is a three-pronged approach — education, engineering, and enforcement. If you look at India’s economic success, and more important, [the prospects] over the next 20 years, the bulk of it is going to come from intellectual property — in life sciences, software, entertainment and Bollywood, or engineering design. So, it is in India’s self-interest to make sure there is a good regime around intellectual property rights (IPR).

We start with our policy-makers and government. With politicians; we continue on to the judiciary. We [are] helping Karnataka and West Bengal set up IPR courts. We are giving IPR scholarships at the National Law College. We are training the law enforcement agencies.

We are also doing broad education to consumers about what are the consequences of piracy. Pirated software is far more vulnerable to virus attacks than genuine is. We make businesses aware that they are violating the law.

The second lever is engineering. If you are using a pirated version, your experience should be perceptibly different and worse. So, under Windows Genuine Advantage, we don’t allow our downloads of anything other than security updates, unless you can prove that you are using a genuine copy.

In Windows Vista, one of the things we are doing is: if you can’t show that you are using genuine [software] and you don’t go and get a genuine version, you will operate in ‘Reduced Functionality Mode’ — a very, very diminished state.

The third leg of the stool is enforcement. We are partnering with industry — FICCI, NASSCOM, and others — to try, essentially, [to] channel enforcement. Because, the bulk of piracy is by large-scale people who are running a business around pirated software.

IPR is becoming a central policy issue for the government. They recognise that this is in India’s self-interest. [Indian] IPR laws are pretty good. It is in the enforcement or lack of enforcement that we really struggle.

Last week, Karnataka opened its first IPR court. We [at Microsoft] believe that States like West Bengal will be following fairly soon.

When you look at industry, NASSCOM has taken a very strong view on the importance of IPR, genuine software and so forth. So, it is resonating.

Exceedingly positive. They don’t [see this as intrusiveness]. NASSCOM has proposed the setting up of fast-track courts. And, that has resonated well. And, we got a number of very favourable decisions last year on the cases we filed.

Curb …

We [at Microsoft] have been using technology to make people aware that they are witting or unwitting victims of piracy. For about a year. But we haven’t really done much to curb it.

In the past, what you would get was a notification that ‘You are probably a victim of piracy, and you may want to go to this person, a Microsoft-authorised re-seller, and get a genuine copy.’ And, ‘Here are the consequences to you, if you are using pirated software.’ We stopped at that.

What we will do with Vista is: be more aggressive around the user-experience.

Yeah. If you do a web-search, you will see the reaction of the channel.

The ingredients remain the same. The specific recipe varies according to a country. Russia is a high-piracy country. There, the Government has been vigorous in driving enforcement. And, the piracy rate is coming down at an extremely fast rate. [In] China, another high-piracy country, the Government has insisted that every PC must be shipped with a legal operating system — not necessarily from Microsoft.

It is ignorance, to start with. That can no longer be excused, once you are operating as a business. And there, it tends to be one of two behaviours. One is under-licensing; but the bigger worry is a deliberate and systematic piracy. Indian businesses today are making record profits, and their refusal to pay for the software they use is a bit unconscionable.

At one stage, that was probably true. Today, we [at Microsoft] have drastically discounted software [prices] for educational purposes — very special pricing for governments.

Anything we [at Microsoft] do from the technology perspective, we do on a global basis. There was a big shift 15 years ago from mainframes to client-server computing. Now, we are seeing an equally dramatic paradigm shift: from software to a combination of software plus CLOUD-base services. It is an industry acronym for the web-base services. If you have got a non-genuine copy of software, it will not be able to access those services. This is a very promising trend for software companies to crack down on piracies.

The U.S. would be at about 2.5 on 10, 10 being terrible and 1 being exceptionally good. You find Switzerland and the Nordic countries even lower, India at about 7 out of 10; China at 8 and 8.5; some African countries and some of our South Asian neighbours being 9, 9.5.

Every time somebody invents a better mouse-trap, criminals figure out how to break that.

The best Microsoft or any technology company can do is to make it harder and harder, so that the casual pirate is deterred. It will be hard to stop the determined pirate.

In the last two years, addressing affordability has been a huge focus of the company. [And] now, it is the first time that the company is putting a very determined effort to engineer our products so that they are harder to pirate. We will get rapidly better; but our existing product offerings, I would not say, are super-high on being piracy-proof.

The principles are the same. We have tried to address to a fair degree; arguably, not enough, because it is a journey. It is a climate that we have to change.

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“Ignorance of software piracy can no longer be excused”

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