San Francisco  - Software piracy cost software companies more than 50 billion dollars last year, according to a study released Tuesday by the Business Software Alliance, an industry trade group.

The report said that worldwide losses totaled 53 billion dollars, an 11-per-cent increase over the previous years.

The study estimated that pirated software accounted for 41 per cent of all software installations globally, compared to 44 per cent legitimate commercial software. The remaining 15 per cent of software was free or open source.

The study said that the countries with the lowest piracy rates are the United States, Japan, New Zealand and Luxembourg, all near 20 per cent. The highest software piracy countries are Armenia, Bangladesh, Georgia and Zimbabwe, all over 90 per cent.

China's piracy rate was 80 per cent.

Central and Eastern Europe was the region with the highest rate of illegal software use, with pirated versions representing 66 per cent of all installations, followed by Latin America at 65 per cent, Asia- Pacific at 61 per cent and the Middle East and Africa at 59 per cent.

North America had the lowest piracy rate at 21 per cent, followed by Western Europe with 33 per cent.

While emerging economies account for 45 per cent of all PC sales, they account for just 20 per cent of the PC software market, said the report, noting that if the emerging economies' PC software share were the same as it is for PC hardware, the software market would grow by 40 billion dollars a year. (dpa)