Software piracy sounds like a virtually victimless crime.
But despite a slow decline in piracy rates, it is costing the UK software industry 290m per year. The channel is a big loser too. Steve Caunce, software marketing manager at Computacenter, agrees. Sometimes this is due to bad practice, but often it's poor logic, as in the case of the blue-chip company which installed every application it owned onto each of its PCs, guessed how many of these copies would actually be used, then bought that number of licences. Sometimes staff or contractors have installed bootleg software or programs copied from previous employers.