Cho Jin-seo, Staff Reporter for the Korea Times, has written a puff piece for the Business Software Alliance, featuring Jeffrey Hardee, vice president and regional director of BSA link here. Hardee is flogging a study made by a research firm, IDC, purporting to show that piracy is rampant in Korea and costs the country billions. The study found that "about 45 percent of computer programs in use in offices were illegal copies in Korea in 2006." He goes on, 'The study demonstrated a 10-point drop in piracy over a four-year period can add an additional $1.4 billion to the economy. That is certainly an achievable target ... `For every $1 of software sold, it has a multiplier effect of $1 to $3 in the local industry, among channel and service providers. So the local contribution is nearly $1 billion out of $1.4 billion. $1 billion will stay in the country.'' An account of the benefits of piracy to the Korean economy is absent from this calculation.

I served as Economic Counselor in Korea in the 70's. We were continually harassing the Korean government to close the small shops that sold pirated software, but on the whole, the police were reluctant to prosecute poor Koreans, much less put them out of business. The Koreans I knew had little sympathy for poor Microsoft and that seems not to have changed.

We opponents of patented software have a problem, however, in pointing out how crazy the current American law on intellectual property is. Few in the American public, much less in the Korean, are aware how screwed up the system has become. In Korea and elsewhere, they also need to learn how IP as promised in our constitution to foster innovation has lost its way.