Those crazy idiots are at it again: every year at this time a study comes out from the Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft (see this post from 2002 for last year’s version).

Every year they report that Prince Edward Island leads the country in software piracy and make us out to be a bunch of criminals.

And every year I point out that their “research” is so broken that to get accurate numbers for a place the size of Prince Edward Island is impossible and that, by releasing their numbers anyway, they are slandering all 137,000 of us.

Nonetheless, watch CBC or The Guardian this week or next and, dollars to donuts, you’ll see a story called something like “Piracy Study Shows Islanders Lead the Nation.”

I’m a software developer — I make my living from writing software. If anyone should be concerned about this issue it’s me. But I can’t, in any way, give credence to the work of these people, and consider it criminal that, year after year, they spread their lies.

Sigh.