Digital piracy is a deadly boring topic that nobody wants to hear about in the Kingdom any more. That’s a pity because a 2008 IDC survey showed that a ten point reduction in PC software piracy would deliver more than 1,000 new jobs, $5 million in new tax revenues and $400 million in economic growth in Saudi Arabia. According to IDC, “this incremental boost to the economy would add highly skilled jobs to the labor force, support the creation of new companies and fund public services. Because most of the benefits accrue to services and channel firms, most of the benefits from lowering piracy stay within the country.”
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) and its members have been working for more than a decade to bring down piracy rates in the region. Their efforts could be better though. When it comes to awareness, the resources they’ve made available through http://w3.bsa.org/middleeast// are out of date and far from being relevant in a country specific fashion. Most software vendors have made it very easy to buy their products anywhere, often through multiple channels, but they need to do more to support local developers and Arabization efforts. It’s past time too for the government ministries to crush the distributors of pirated software. A visit to Alkhobar’s Al-Dossary Towers this week showed this is not happening. Vendors at Al-Dossary were openly selling all sorts of pirated PC and small business software. Allowing such trade to continue damages the country’s reputation.
While software vendors have done a good job getting original products into the local market, the same can’t be said for companies in the entertainment business. The Internet is a global resource but in this digital age too many in the entertainment business are still stuck in old distribution models. If a Saudi teenager goes to the Apple site, he can’t purchase a song or a movie legally. He can look at everything that’s available, but he can’t buy anything because he isn’t a resident of the 22 first world nations that are allowed to make purchases through the iStore. Blocked from legal means of downloading most songs or movies, Saudi teens simply rip whatever entertainment they want.
It’s a lose/lose situation for everyone — even the teens. The loss to the artists is easy to see but the hurt to the teenagers is more difficult to understand. When teens grow up in an environment where they aren’t allowed to complete a simple transaction due to nationality, it shows in a subtle way how their nation is excluded from the global digital society. They quickly lose respect for international intellectual property regulations because it’s perceived that these have been created merely to prevent them from accessing content — content that others of their age in the US or Japan are allowed to access. Then they rip that content and commit a criminal act, again and again. What sort of foundation does this create for them to become good citizens in a digital world? And what will it mean for the long-term development of the Kingdom’s knowledge economy when there’s no respect from society for intellectual property?