The alarm was sounded by Microsoft Italy, for obvious reasons one of the main parties affected by the phenomenon of the use of counterfeit software. Although, as explained by the research carried out in collaboration with Bocconi's Center for Research on Sustainability and Value (CReSV) and presented yesterday at the Milanese university, malpractice not only has a negative impact on the sector in which they operate, the information technology sector, but also ends up affecting the entire production system of the country.
And that's not all: the use of illegal software does not lead to clear financial advantages for companies, despite the high risks from a legal point of view. "Microsoft believes it is important to highlight how the use of counterfeit software has a strong negative impact also on the competition front and on the entire local economy". These are the words of Thomas Urek, director of anti-piracy – legal and corporate affairs, Microsoft EMEA. “The research demonstrates how software piracy continues to drain resources from the legal economy, to damage our production system and the ecosystem of Italian startups. For this reason, in our opinion, governments should accelerate regulatory developments to protect both intellectual property and free competition”.
Not just a legal problem, therefore, but one of the many cases of underground economy. And, as often happens, a very Italian phenomenon. The study “Counterfeit software and unfair competition. The Italian case", conducted on a sample of 289 listed Italian companies, in fact certifies - making use of the comparison with the data of the annual BSA (Business Software Alliance) report - that Italy is the second country in Europe for the use of counterfeit software by companies, with a piracy rate of around 48%, compared to a European average of 34%. To understand whether piracy has an impact on the competitiveness of the country-system and to understand what are the specific effects from a financial point of view that unfair competitors generate on honest businesses, the CReSV researchers analyzed the statistical relationships between software and all the main economic-financial variables of companies, starting from the assumption that greater investments in software are synonymous with less use of illegal software.
In primo luogo, the study shows that there is a positive correlation between working capital and software investment, i.e. that high levels of software investment are correlated with high levels of working capital in companies. So companies with lower levels of working capital (which are therefore more able to generate cash flows) resort more to counterfeit software on average. This practice distorts the market, the researchers argue, as firms with higher levels of working capital (mainly start-ups and young companies), which already tend to have a worse financial situation and more difficulty generating cash flows, find themselves having to face another difficulty. As long as companies capable of high self-financing, which is inversely related to the amount of working capital, act illegally and make it difficult for companies trying to expand, the effects of using counterfeit software will be negative for the industry and the general public of the stakeholders, affecting the growth capacity of the system as a whole.
In terms of the profitability of the use of pirated programs and the legal consequences to which companies are exposed, the study shows that there is a neutral statistical link between the financial structure of companies (in detail, the ratio between financial debt and equity) and investments in software. In other words, an investment in legal software does not damage the financial balance since the companies that need resources to invest in intellectual property procure their own and third-party capital proportionally, therefore the financial structure is not affected. At least from this point of view, therefore, using pirated software is not convenient, given the strong risk on the legal front.
