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BSA Tries To Exploit Somali Piracy News In PR Campaign Against Software Sharing
from the great-moments-in-dumb-marketing-campaigns dept
We already wrote about how ridiculous it is to compare Somali high seas pirates with music, movie and software fans downloading an unauthorized copy of something off the internet -- and even the press is starting to question the wisdom of calling unauthorized file sharing "piracy." Yet, that hasn't stopped the BSA, masters of misleading through questionable stats from ramping up a marketing campaign that purposely tries to compare software file sharers with Somali pirates. As Gordon Haff at News.com notes:
"This has got to be one of the most tone-deaf and cynically opportunistic PR pitches I've seen for quite some time. It's one thing to figuratively equate piracy with making digital copies of software, music, movies, or books. We can debate endlessly whether such actions are truly stealing or not. But that's not the point. It's that to literally and deliberately equate the two in the wake of pirates taking a ship's crew hostage and the US Navy subsequently killing three of the attackers...Well, words fail me."
