The report predicts 4.5 million new information technology jobs worldwide, US$64 billion in extra tax revenues and US$400 billion in economic growth. In page after page, the report illustrates how the world would benefit as long as we all join together in their global war on piracy.

But all the statistics depend on bogus assumptions. The BSA promises a world without piracy as a state of digital nirvana, where all competition is equal and everyone can afford their products. In reality, our society is far from perfect, and piracy is a reflection of that fact rather than a cause of it.

For Microsoft, Symantec, Adobe or Macromedia to assume that there is no alternative to their overpriced applications shows the software industry at its most arrogant. Their assumption is that people either would not want to run any other software or that there is no other software to run.

One highlight of the report is a chart illustrating how piracy hurts tax revenues. The correlation may make sense to the BSA, but to anyone else it is so clearly bogus it is a miracle IDC was willing to put its logo on the report. The BSA's chart shows the top 10 earners are all in Europe and North America. Down on the low-tax end of the curve, we get China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Russia, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Turkey, the Philippines and Romania.

Governments also earn more revenues from taxes on high-performance cars than they do from one-litre hatchbacks. But nobody suggests Filipinos close down their jeep factories and buy Ferraris. All the table proves is that governments in wealthy countries raise more money from taxation than poor countries.

The BSA's flawed statistics rely heavily on the theory that you can calculate software piracy by comparing chip shipments to software sales. It assumes that all chip buyers are equal, and the prime driver for piracy is greed. But all customers are not equal. For a buyer in the United States, US$600 for a PC may seem like a small investment. To add on another US$600 for a basic operating system and office suite may be irritating, but it is affordable. A computer buyer in any of the BSA's black spots is likely to see that US$1,200 as at least one year's salary. If the BSA could wave a wand and totally eliminate piracy in those countries, tax revenues would not increase; they would disappear.

Take Hong Kong - a wealthy society with a mid-range piracy problem. Although the BSA agrees that piracy rates in Hong Kong have dropped significantly, the fact is that our software industry has shrunk with them. The reason for our software industry's slow, choking death has not been piracy but competition from the mainland and an over-reliance on the packaged products peddled by the BSA's members. As we reduced piracy, we generated more jobs elsewhere.

Piracy rates in the most developed countries can be more easily contained because those countries tend to have wealthier, better-educated users and an effective legal system that can enforce intellectual property laws.

Another issue the BSA ignores is free software. The growth of Linux may still register as a blip compared with Windows, but it is a blip that has managed to overtake Apple on the desktop. Even with IBM among its membership, the BSA does not represent the free software movement. Nor does it represent the hundreds of thousands of people working with free software in developing nations. On the contrary, most prominent BSA members are threatened by free software just as they are by software piracy.

But probably the biggest problem with the report is the confusing of 'software', 'services' and 'IT sector'. The report implies that the software sector is dominated by proprietary, packaged software. In fact, the IT sector employs far more people in hardware, support and services than in stand-alone applications.

Even BSA members such as Microsoft and Symantec are moving from the limitations of shrink-wrapped software and turning their products into services. Without regular patches and upgrades, Windows or Norton Anti-Virus would cease to function. Services make piracy more difficult and also less appealing. If you cannot update cracked software, why buy it?

For all its promises of worldwide growth, the BSA has no interest in fostering more competition in developing economies. The BSA does not speak for them, but for the world's largest software firms - companies that make a living by squashing small rivals. Governments in developing countries should remember that, no matter how good the promises sound, it is not their interests that the BSA represents.