Nairobi - As much as 81 percent of computer software used in Africa had been pirated, costing governments and the hi-tech industry billions of dollars in revenue and choking growth, experts warned yesterday.
"We cannot sit back and watch our work being pirated"
Meeting at a recent workshop in the Kenyan capital, representatives of software companies, including United States software firm Microsoft, government and media companies said that Africa must enhance and enforce intellectual property laws if it was to truly benefit from innovations.
Microsoft's anti-piracy manager for eastern and southern Africa, Abed Hlatshwayo, said that the region was awash in illegal software worth more than $12,4-billion (about R93-billion).
"We cannot sit back and watch our work being pirated," he said. "We need to change this so that we can all contribute to the growth of our economies through an effective intellectual property rights framework, provide more education and encourage better asset management for business and enforcement."
Established piracy
But convincing the growing number of African computer users to work with legitimate software will be difficult.
In many African countries, piracy is so endemic that it is virtually impossible to find legal copies, according to industry surveys.
In Zimbabwe, 90 percent of software in use is estimated to be pirated. Botswana and Nigeria share the dubious distinction of 82 percent piracy rates while Kenya fares little better at 80 percent.
Much of that software, about 90 percent, has entered Africa from nations with traditionally weak copyright enforcement: the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, China and Indonesia.
But African pirates are rapidly entering the market, with Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Zambia added this year to the top 20 list of high piracy states as determined by the Business Software Alliance, an umbrella group for the industry.
Threat to copyright-based industry
The surge has been "phenomenally" exacerbated by the introduction of digital technology and internet file sharing, according to Edward Sigei, an attorney with the Kenya Copyright Board.
He told the conference that more had to be done to build awareness of piracy among consumers. He added that governments had to boost import controls.
"Piracy has become a threat to copyright-based industry as it has wiped out the incentives for creators, which was offered by the copyright protection. This threatens the whole rationale of copyright system."
Sigei stressed that the ultimate responsibility lay with the owner, but also with governments. - AFP
This article was first published in Business Report.