TechLahore

Pakistan Computer Association partners with Microsoft to reduce piracy

Software piracy is fast becoming extinct in Pakistan. Yes, it still happens at an individual level, but these days you can hardly find a reasonably sized company that deliberately uses pirated software. Microsoft and the BSA have played a huge role in this, for obvious reasons! But the upshot of all of this is that an environment with low piracy creates domestic opportunities for local Pakistani software companies to invest in R&D with a hope of recouping that investment and going on to make money.

So the latest Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the Pakistan Computer Association and Microsoft is a good thing. While it obviously protects Microsoft’s interests by educating resellers on the perils of pirated applications and the benefits of the genuine article, it also indirectly helps local software companies in Pakistan struggling to protect their intellectual property.

The News International reports:

Khawar Mehmood, PCA Karachi Chapter Executive, said: “The MoU will allow us to create a sequential procedure on how to deal with the current state of software piracy. We will utilise various techniques and devise programmes to help us in curbing piracy and stopping the leakage of mal-ware into the general market which deprives licensed vendors of their profitability.”

We’ve written about piracy in Pakistan in the past. And in fact, one of our predictions for 2008 was that piracy would decrease… indeed it has consistently been going down. The BSA’s been pretty active in Pakistan also and this article published at TechLahore goes into more depth regarding those efforts.

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