Vietnam’s ICT community has felt disappointed with recently-released global study on the country’s software piracy rate.

Vietnam’s ICT community has felt disappointed with recently-released global study on the country’s software piracy rate.

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The world’s foremost advocate for the software industry Business Software Alliance (BSA) released the BSA-IDC Global PC Software Piracy Study 2009 last week, which read that the PC software piracy rate had remained at 85 per cent in Vietnam during the past three years.

“Despite the PC software piracy rate remaining at 85 per cent in Vietnam, we should also note that there has been a 5 percentage point drop in piracy rates in the past five years. We believe that the rates itself do not tell a whole picture,” said Dao Anh Tuan, spokesperson of BSA Vietnam.

According to the study, PC shipments in Vietnam grew 17 per cent, but the number of individual consumers grew by 42 per cent. More than 70 per cent of all software deployed in 2009 went to individual consumers and two thirds of that were pirated.

However, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Minh Hong said that the software piracy rate [85 per cent] released by the study did not truly reflect the real situation in Vietnam.
“Vietnam’s software piracy rate has been getting lower year on year as a result of big efforts the government and business community have made to protect copyright.”

Hong added that in June, the ministry would publish the White Paper of ITC in Vietnam in 2010 providing reviews of the country’s ITC development and information on software usage in Vietnam.

Bui Huu Cu, chairman of Hanoi IT Enterprises club - with 50 PC retail companies, said: “There is progress as our members do not install pirated software for customers. The club members also paid for 1,000 Microsoft copyright usages last year.”

The report from the Copyright Office of Vietnam read that state agencies in Vietnam such as the State Bank, the Ministry of Finance, Vietcombank, Vietinbank had spent an increasing amount of money for operation systems copyright usage on their stations and servers.

“Obvious progress has been made in the reduction of software piracy in the corporate sector, especially in large corporations.” “No pirated software was found in several regular inspection raids of large corporations. Great concern, however, remains with small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) like internet cafes and consumers,” said Vu Xuan Thanh, chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

The ministry conducted 27 investigations, found 10 violated organisations with fines of VND145 million ($7,600) and sent 10,000 small -and - medium enterprises a warning to use protected copyright, last year.

BSA is the largest and most international IT industry group, with policy and educational programmes in 80 countries.

Source: VIR