As reader Robert points out, this is certainly the situation in Canada, where multiple different sources of news are running the same Canadian Press wire story about the BSA report. The CP story is completely one-sided, and certainly makes the situation sound dire:

The value of computer software piracy in Canada totalled just more than $1.1 billion last year with 40 per cent of computer users admitting they acquired software illegally, according to a study released Tuesday.

The Business Software Alliance study found that nearly one in three copies of software was unlicensed in Canada in 2011.

"If 40 per cent of consumers admitted they shoplift -- even rarely --authorities would react by increasing police patrols and penalties," said Jacquie Famulak, head of the Business Software Alliance Canada committee.

"Software piracy demands a similar response: concerted public education and vigorous law enforcement," Famulak said in a news release.

That story is based solely on the BSA's press release (pdf), which draws partially from the global study and partially from the Canadian user survey (pdf). If a single reporter or editor had bothered to spend five minutes doing research, they might have realized that the real picture is much different. The news reports sloppily mash together the 40% figure with the "nearly one in three" (specifically 27%) figure. The former is the number of users who admitted to pirating software in a survey, and the latter is the estimated percentage of pirated software as a portion of total software installs. The methodology behind both figures is highly questionable, but even putting that aside, the BSA's own numbers tell another story when examined more closely. For example, the 40% figure is a summary of several different categories. Take a look at the full graph:

Only 14% of people said they pirated software any more than "rarely", and only 6% said more than "occasionally". To say that 40% of people admitted to piracy is not technically inaccurate—it's just highly misleading in tone and tenor. Then there's the 27% piracy rate for software. The press release, and the news reports that copy it, leave out a very important detail: 27% is an all-time low, and the result of a steeper decline than in any other country in the world. Michael Geist points this out, plus the fact that the BSA called Canada a "low-piracy" country in 2009, and rates have steadily declined since:

For the past few years, the BSA report has repeatedly found that piracy is declining in Canada. In 2009, Canada was characterized as a "low piracy country", in 2010 the industry noted that Canada's piracy rate was at an all-time low, and last year it dropped further to another all-time low.

The latest report says the Canadian piracy rate dropped further in 2011. In fact, over the past five years, the Canadian rate has dropped by 18% (from 33% to 27%), the sharpest decline in the world. No other country has seen its piracy rate drop as quickly.

Seems like that would have been worth mentioning in a story that gets distributed to news outlets across the country. But instead, we see the same pattern all over the world: Europe, the UK, South Africa, India, Malaya—anywhere the BSA put out a press release. Thanks to some combination of laziness, incompetence and indifference ingrained in the mass-media news cycle, the BSA can say what it wants and rely on the press to be its own personal PR vehicle.

"estimates of piracy rates are based mostly on inferences and the 'gut feeling' of the BSA's research organisation IDC;

1. The report counts every unauthorized piece of software as a lost sale. You have to dig through separate PDFs to find this info, but when you finally get to the methodology it states:

   The software losses are based on the piracy rate and equal the value of software installed not paid for.

   That's a huge, and obviously incorrect assumption. Many of the folks using the software likely would not have paid for it otherwise, or would have used cheaper or open source options instead.
2. The report makes no effort to count the positive impact of unauthorized use of software in leading to future software sales. This is something that even Microsoft has admitted has helped the company grow over time. But according to the BSA's report, this doesn't matter.
3. The report also proudly notes: "Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities." However, "ripple effects" are easily disproved as double or triple counting the same dollar. Using ripple effects like that inflates the final number by two or three times. In the link here, Tim Lee explains this (in reference to an MPAA study done by IPI, but it applies here to the BSA study done by IDC as well):

   If a foreigner gives me $1, and I turn around and buy an apple from you for a dollar, and then you turn around and buy an orange from another friend for a dollar, we haven't thereby increased our national wealth by $3. At the beginning of the sequence, we have an apple and an orange. At the end, we have an apple, an orange, and a dollar. Difference: one dollar. No matter how many times that dollar changes hands, there's still only one dollar that wasn't there before.
   
   Yet in IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the DVD and $2 to the guy who shipped it to Canada, society has benefited by $10+$7+$2=$19. Yet some simple math shows that this is nonsense: the studio is $1 richer, the trucker is $2, and the manufacturer is $7. Shockingly enough, that adds up to $10. What each participant cares about is his profits, not his revenues.

   This is a huge fallacy that the BSA an IDC refuse to acknowledge. When I discussed it with them in May, they insisted that they only wanted to talk about piracy rates, not the loss number. I wonder why...
4. Next, if they're going to count ripple effects in one direction, it's only fair to also count them in the other direction. That is, they complain that:

   Lost revenue to technology companies also puts a strain on their ability to invest in new jobs and new technologies. For example, the $11.4 billion in piracy losses to software vendors and service providers in the eight states would have been enough to fund more than 54,000 tech industry jobs.

   But what they don't acknowledge is the ripple effects in the other direction. That is, if (going by their assumption, remember) every company that uses an unauthorized copy of software had to pay for it, that would represent $11.4 billion in money that all of those other companies could not use to fund jobs at those companies. What about all of those jobs?
5. The BSA/IDC stat on lost tax revenue also miscounts on the point above, since it includes the lost income tax revenue from those 54,000 lost jobs, but does not count the equivalent income tax revenue from those other jobs. In fact, in the fine print, the report notes:

   "Employment losses are calculated from revenue losses, and only apply to employment in the IT industry, not IT professionals in end-user organizations. Tax revenue losses are calculated from revenue losses (VAT and corporate income tax) and employment losses (income and social taxes)."

   In other words, the income tax losses only count one side of the equation and totally ignore the lost income tax revenue from the lost jobs on the other side of the equation. Oops.
6. It seems likely that the eventual tax benefits of the unauthorized use of software is most likely to greatly outweigh the lost tax revenue elsewhere. That's because the use of software within industries is a productivity tool that increases overall productivity and output, which would increase taxes beyond just the income taxes of the employees. The study, of course, ignores this point.
7. Worst of all, the report seems to assume that direct software sales are the only business model for the software industry, ignoring plenty of evidence from companies that have adopted business models that embrace free software -- generating billions of dollars for the economy (and in taxes). And that's what this really comes down to. It's a business model issue. If others started adopting these business models as well, there wouldn't be any "losses" at all.

• How would you promote the progress of science and creativity, as enumerated in the U.S. Constitution, by upholding and strengthening copyright law and preventing its diminishment?
  
  Well, first, it might help to point out that the U.S. publishing industry was initially built on extremely loose copyrights, so the very idea that strengthening copyright law is necessary to promote progress of science and creativity is provably false. Even the biggest defender of copyrights these days (and a backer of Ross' organization), Disney, owes much of its early success to being able to use the characters others created. That, alone, should be argument enough for a stronger public domain, rather than stronger copyright. On top of that, plenty of research has shown that by strengthening copyright, you will often diminish how much content is created. More to the point, with the rise of modern communications tools, and a world where content is made by everyone, rather than just a small group of professionals, the entire concept of copyright needs to be revisited from scratch to figure out what really is necessary.
  
  
• How do you feel the rights that have served our economy and spurred creativity in the physical world should apply in the digital world?
  
  The rights that have served our economy and spurred creativity are quite important. The First Amendment, for example, is a key right, preventing the government from passing laws that take away freedom of speech. It's that freedom that is important and clearly should be (and is) extended into the digital world. In fact, we should reinforce that by removing dangerous and creativity harming restrictions on speech, found in laws like the DMCA that hold back perfectly legitimate and reasonable uses of content, often hindering creativity.
  
  
• How would you protect the incentive to create by committing sufficient resources to support effective civil and criminal enforcement of copyright laws domestically and internationally?
  
  There's a false assumption there, that the incentive to create is copyright laws. If you look at the incentives to create historically, you'll see that copyright has rarely had much to do with it at all. Instead, plenty of other factors, often coming from the marketplace had much stronger incentives. In fact, copyright has all too often held back incentives to create. As you well know, plenty of people created plenty of content prior to copyright existing. And, famously, once copyright was put in place, it often gave those who had created content earlier less incentive to create, as they could just sit back and rely on royalties from earlier content. More importantly, modern communications systems have shown that the incentive to create often has little to do with monetary rewards. Much of the internet is filled with user-generated content that was created not because of copyright, but for many other reasons. In fact, we're seeing a tremendous explosion in content creation these days -- often in spite of copyright rather than because of it. So, the best way to protect the incentive to create is to continue to get restrictions on creation out of the way, remove barriers to creation, expand the public domain, broaden the definition of fair use and get rid of pointless restriction such as those found in the DMCA.
  
  
• How would you ensure inclusion of copyright protections in bilateral, regional and multilateral trade agreements to protect creators and foster global development?
  
  Aha! A trick question! Why would we want to include monopoly protections in a free trade agreement? Monopoly rights deserve no place in any free trade agreement -- and, in fact, are against the very idea of free trade.
  
  
• How would you protect the rights of creators to express themselves freely under the principles established in the First Amendment?
  
  An excellent and important question. I would do so by getting rid of much of the DMCA, which unfairly puts excessive restrictions on the rights of creators to express themselves freely. I'd also look towards lowering the copyright burden on creators, expanding the public domain, rolling back unlimited copyright extensions and increasing the power of fair use -- all with an eye towards protecting the rights of the majority of content creators today not to be bullied by a bunch of companies with huge lobbying budgets and increasingly obsolete business models.