India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom) is taking a traditional approach to crushing modern crime – it’s using an elephant to trample pirated software CDs. Nasscom’s jumbo PR stunt was used to highlight the association’s response to India’s thriving piracy sector. According to Nasscom, counterfeit and unlicensed software represents 60% of India’s total applications sales, and costs the country’s software industry more than $160m per year. A spokesperson for the Business Software Alliance said that India’s piracy problem is actually less severe than that in Eastern Europe, where 77% of applications are pirated. But India will have to keep up with the heavyweight attack on pirates if it wants to cut its problem down Western European and US levels, where the BSA says piracy is running at 37% and 27% respectively.
