Time to cash in on the network externaly in Africa?

via p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

The Microsoft reality configuration team is getting plenty of mileage out of a shock-horror claim that 81% of computer software now in use in Africa is illegal or, put another way, it wasn’t bought from Microsoft. And this is costing governments and the high-tech industry [read Bill and the Boyz], “billions of dollars in revenue and choking growth,” say “experts” quoted by Agence France-Presse. What to do if Africa wants information technology to “help jumpstart development and reduce poverty”? Enhance and enforce intellectual property laws. And this time the BSA (Business Software Alliance), whose imaginative stats have been called into question, and of which Microsoft is a member, wasn’t pumping out the numbers. Instead, “Meeting at a recent workshop in the Kenyan capital, representatives of software companies, including United States giant Microsoft, government and media companies heard stunning piracy figures and the costs to local economies,” says AFP. The “stunning figures” of course came from Microsoft in the shape of Abed Hlatshwayo, the company’s anti-piracy manager for Eastern and Southern Africa who, says the story, claims the region is, “awash in illegal copies and downloads worth more than $12,4-billion”. Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya are named as the principal culprits and, “As a result of piracy in Africa, Microsoft lost $31 million between 2004 and 2006,” says the Angola Press, also quoting Hlatshwayo.