The global trade in pirated software, from versions of Microsoft Windows XP to Adobe Acrobat, hit nearly $29 billion in 2003, an industry trade body said in its annual survey on Wednesday.
That value amounted to about 60 percent of all legal global desktop software sales of $51 billion, said the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
Since the Internet boom, software firms and media conglomerates have seen a rapid increase in piracy as online file-sharing networks and "warez" trading sites make it easier to exchange all manner of copyrighted material.
"Peer-to-peer file-sharing services are becoming a huge problem for us," said Jeffrey Hardee, BSA's Asia-Pacific director.
The BSA has spent large sums to prevent users of business and consumer software from installing unlicensed software duplicates from operating systems to design programs. It has also worked with police to crack down on groups that traffic in pirated software.
In April, law enforcers in Britain, Germany and the United States dismantled a series of pirated software distributors and seized $50 million in illegal software.
While few dispute that the piracy problem is growing worse, the BSA said its piracy tally in previous years may have been slightly inflated.
The BSA came under some criticism for its previous tallies because it couldn't clearly spell out how much of a fall-off in sales was the result of piracy and how much was due to the availability of legitimate alternative products, such as open source software commonly called "shareware".
It changed its methodology and its research firm in the past year, opting this year to look at what pieces of software are on the typical computer user's machine to determine a piracy figure, rather than devise a figure based on computer shipments and past buying trends.
The BSA's new research firm, IDC, estimates the 2003 global piracy rate was 36 percent, roughly 2 percent above the BSA's revised 2002 figure. The BSA's previously reported global piracy rate in 2002 was 39 percent.
While the piracy rate may have been inflated, the monetary value of previous tallies was artificially low, because they failed to account for the number of pirated operating systems and PC games in circulation, IDC found.
In dollar terms, the losses were greatest in Western Europe, where an estimated $9.6 billion of pirated software was installed on machines, followed by Asia and North America.
Vietnam and China were singled out as the piracy capitals, accounting for 92 percent of all computer software installed. Ukraine, Indonesia and Russia again ranked in the top 10, the BSA said. The BSA counts major tech firms including Microsoft, Apple Computer and Intel among its members.
