Software piracy has dropped by 10 percent in Taiwan -- the biggest improvement globally last year -- due to improved enforcement and increased public awareness, software industry and government officials announced yesterday.
Figures for last year released by the Business Software Alliance show that Taiwan's piracy rate is now 43 percent compared with 53 percent the previous year.
The piracy rate contrasts the demand for software against the actual number of legal software packages sold in each country.
"Last year was the government's intellectual property rights [IPR] action year and the improvement in the piracy rate is a direct result of their increased manpower and police cooperation to fight pirates," Sung Hong-ti (
"We also worked together with the government on an education campaign to remind corporate users to use legal software. We gave them a 45-day grace period to buy legal software last year and in that period the Taiwanese became highly aware of IPR issues," she said.
Taiwan now ranks No. 4 in the software anti-piracy stakes in the Asia-Pacific region after New Zealand, Japan and Australia. The nation has jumped from No. 7 in 2001, surpassing South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong.
The nation ranks 26th globally, up from 38th in 2001.
The country's No. 2 IPR man lapped up the news.
"This is definitely good news and it encourages us to work harder this year to improve our enforcement record more," said Jack Lu (盧文祥), deputy director-general of the Ministry of Economic Affairs' Intellectual Property Office.
"The education campaign was a very important factor in reducing the piracy rate -- not only the government campaign but also the BSA campaign and the campaigns of private IPR holders. The campaign is of equal importance as catching counterfeiters," he said.
Lu now plans to beat the global average of 39 percent.
"My personal benchmark will be to reduce the piracy rate below the global average, so we hope we can drop another 4 [percent] or 5 percent this year," Lu said.
The country is bucking the trend in the Asia-Pacific region, which has seen a rise in piracy of 1 percent to 55 percent, making it the worst in the world.
Losses as a result of software piracy in the Asia-Pacific area rose by 16 percent from US$4.72 billion to US$5.48 billion. Meanwhile, losses domestically dropped by 17 percent over the same period, from US$136.7 million in 2001 to US$113.3 million last year.
One tech veteran of Silicon Valley and the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park, who now works for an international law firm in Taipei specializing in intellectual property rights, welcomed the news yesterday, but with reservations.
"Taiwan in the 40s is an improvement as it is approaching the levels of Western Europe and North America in the 20s and 30s," said Steve Hanley, a lawyer with Winkler Partners (
"Public and private enterprises have a great awareness and high compliance rates, but all of us who live in Taiwan know it is very easy to procure pirated material. If we know, why doesn't the government clamp down harder?" he said.
Now that the nation's own software industry is growing, more damage will be felt closer to home so the government may be prompted to act more harshly, Hanley said.
BSA includes some leading names among its membership, including Microsoft Corp.
"As a member of the BSA, we are happy to see the success of Taiwan's battle against software piracy," Eunice Chiou (邱麗孟), general manager of Microsoft Taiwan, said in a statement.
"We are especially happy to see the piracy rate in Taiwan approach the world average. This is significant for Taiwan's goal of developing a knowledge-based economy," she said.
Improving the software piracy rate will give the domestic industry a much-needed shot in the arm, other BSA members said.
"If Taiwan can respect and further protect intellectual property rights, then the software industry will continue to increase its research investments here," said Marvin Chiu (丘立全), general manager of the Taiwan branch of Trend Micro Inc (趨勢科技), the maker of the anti-virus software PC-Cillin.
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
TARIFF TRADE-OFF: Machinery exports to China dropped after Beijing ended its tariff reductions in June, while potential new tariffs fueled ‘front-loaded’ orders to the US The nation’s machinery exports to the US amounted to US$7.19 billion last year, surpassing the US$6.86 billion to China to become the largest export destination for the local machinery industry, the Taiwan Association of Machinery Industry (TAMI, 台灣機械公會) said in a report on Jan. 10. It came as some manufacturers brought forward or “front-loaded” US-bound shipments as required by customers ahead of potential tariffs imposed by the new US administration, the association said. During his campaign, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened tariffs of as high as 60 percent on Chinese goods and 10 percent to 20 percent on imports from other countries.
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS