An article by Jordan Golson for The Industry Standard talks about the release of the BSA 2007 State Piracy Study, which claimed that one in five pieces of software in use in the United States was unlicensed.
Before anyone worries too much, read Lies, Damned lies, and IIPA/BSA/etc statistics. They use these same bogus statistics in their promotion of Bill C-61 and other backward-facing legislative reforms.
The press releases you see from the BSA are laughable, but not funny given there are bureaucrats and politicians that take their silliness seriously.
The claims in the press release that Jordan Golson was quoting spoke about how many police officers that could be paid for by the increased taxes paid by those who paid higher prices for their software. I guess any money not paid to BSA members just disappears and is not spent on other things in the economy (and the taxes collected on this other spending).
I know that people choosing legally lower cost and royalty-free software such as FLOSS is included as "piracy" in these studies, so I guess my supporting FLOSS could even be blamed for their not being enough money to adequately equip the Canadian military in Afghanistan. I guess this makes me a terrorist sympathizer, by the BSA "logic".
Yawn.
Techdirt analysis
Techdirt has a very detailed analysis of the problems with the BSA's methodology.
Mike Linksvayer and p2pnet related articles
Mike Linksvayer posted an article based on the version of this story I posted to p2pnet.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) consultant.