Antipiracy club the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has welcomed its first Thai member, Thai Software Enterprise, makers of the widely used (and widely pirated) Genius accounting package.
Speaking at the announcement, BSA director for antipiracy in Asia, Tarun Sawney, explained how the club's purpose was to help provide a secure digital world for intellectual property.
While most of the BSA's members are big name U.S. software companies, there are some smaller regional members such as BEA from the United Kingdom, Tekla from Scandinavia, Andal from Indonesia and now Thai Software Enterprise.
"I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but the point I'm trying to make regarding the software industry is if you create an environment for it to grow, it will. This will lead to more companies, more investment, new products and more tax revenue for the government. The software industry is a major engine for economic growth," Sawney said.
With widespread piracy, the size of the Thai software market is simply not large enough to encourage development.
Sawney noted that the Thai government, like many other governments, treats software piracy as a criminal offence, with a penalty of up to four years jail and/or an 800,000 baht (US$24,320) fine.
Last year in Thailand, the BSA raided 80 companies and found a total of 3,156 pirated copies of software among 1,558 PCs worth 246 million baht (US$7.5 million).
In the first three months of 2007, raids have been continuing with 430 programs worth 8 million found in 18 companies.
The BSA also cooperated with police in raiding an Internet software pirate, gluajung.com. In one year, the site owner allegedly sold over 12 million baht (US$364,800) in pirated software to customers from the United States, Australia, Laos and Singapore, among other countries, before he was caught.
Somporn Maneeratanakul, managing director of Thai Software Enterprise, said his company was a typical story of a start-up with lots of promise which has been pushed to the brink because of software piracy. "I set up my team back in 1983 and in 1998 we formally became known as Thai Software Enterprise. Our first product was an accounting package, Genius. We were one of the first companies to do mass market software in Thailand and later we ported the package to Windows," he explained.
Today, TSE offers educational software, a secure e-book reader, human resource management packages and an English-Thai dictionary. These were very popular as everyone was using them, though few were actually paying for them.
"We need money to invest and it's depressing when our investment is pirated very quickly. We needed to join the BSA to survive," he said.
Somporn said that today Thai companies are afraid to invest because of rampant piracy and that is not good for the industry. Without Thai companies investing, Thailand will not see versions for local needs or a particular business environment. It will also mean that the quality of mass produced Thai software lags behind the rest of the world.
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