Software piracy is not only harming the companies involved, it is also depriving Saudis of over a thousand jobs every year, according to a study done by an international market research company. Software developers sustain over SR500 million losses every year. The Fiqh Academy has deemed money earned from illegal copying of software as Haram (forbidden). Software piracy is a worldwide phenomenon. According to the latest annual study by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) the software industry lost over $48 billion in sales worldwide due to piracy. Two Saudis traveling to the US in February were arrested at New York airport and blacklisted for having pirated softwares in their computers. Saudi Customs have regularly warned against using and carrying of counterfeited softwares. Many Saudis are now making sure they don't carry pirated programs when traveling abroad. Offenders can face imprisonment between 5 and 20 years and also get black listed, Al-Watan said. Jawad Al-Ridha, Deputy Chairman of the Society of Commercial Software Producers, said 60 percent of computer users in the Mideast use counterfeited programs. Software producing companies lose $170 million every year in Saudi Arabia, a number that is likely to increase by $5 million due to the number of PC users growing by 16 percent every year. The Saudi software market, despite being $4 billion strong, has only 10 Saudi companies with only three registered as members in the BSA. Foreign companies, well established across the globe, carry on easily and make huge money despite piracy losses due to their heavy market share in the growing Saudi software industry which is expected to be $7 billion strong within the next three years. The real losers are smaller Saudi companies. Abdul Aziz Al-Doghaither, owner of a desk software producing company, said that their programs are illegally sold in “day light” due to which his company faced closure many times. Even some major companies use pirated software. He gave an example of a major company that approached them for software maintenance. During maintenance, the programmers discovered that the company was running pirated copies of the program. In order to preserve the product's reputation, his employees replaced them with original copies at company's expense. Young Saudi companies cannot afford to bear such losses, he added. Ahmad Al-Sarri, member of the Committee of Information and Communication Technology at Riyadh's Chamber of Commerce, recalled the tough days of a group of Saudi software businessmen whose companies had financially collapsed. They had to change their businesses from software development to other conventional ones. Mohammad Al-Dhab'aan, representative and lawyer of the BSA in the Kingdom, divided software pirates into three categories: peddlers in computer markets, computer stores that download counterfeit programs for their clients at low price or sometimes for free, and companies that use such programs ignoring licensed and original ones. Al-Dhab'aan said peddlers in computer markets are very organized and control most of the piracy activities. Legal consultant Khaled Al-Shahrani said the first section of the Saudi copyrights law stated up to SR10,000 fine, in addition to compensation for the harmed party and 15 day-closure for establishments violating copyrights. The fine could be raised twofold and closure up to 90 days if they repeated the violation. He said the international copyright alliance have marked 13 countries, including Saudi Arabia, Canada, Russia and China, as “countries to be observed” for high rate of copyright breaches in them. Software companies and jurists hold the Copyrights Administration in the Ministry of Information responsible for the weak protection of intellectual rights. They say if the number of people working in the administration was raised and the law was applied firmly, the rate of piracy in Saudi Arabia could drop to as little as 3 percent against the current 51 percent. The Copyrights Administration conducted inspection tours in over 8,000 computer establishments and confiscated more than 4 million software programs. Meanwhile, software producing companies are suffering. Their cases circulate between courts and the ministry. Lawyer Mahir Melhim is following up more than 1,000 copyright cases in the Board of Grievances. Saudi companies are creative, he says, but face difficulty in growing as their transactions stay in courts for years. __
