The most pervasive kind of digital piracy...may not be what you think. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. When you think of digital piracy....chances are you think of music or video being passed around through peer to peer networks....or otherwise copied. A company called Cranium Softworks says a larger problem, in terms of dollar losses, comes from the sharing of passwords to access online subscription content. For instance, you may not think twice about sharing your log on for ConsumerReports.com with a friend or family member. Cranium Softworks president Amir Khosrodad...says the problem gets even bigger...

"If you replace Consumer Reports with a market research firm or a financial reporting service. And then imagine a large financial corporation, any one of them here in the New York area, using a single username and password, sharing it across all of their employees, perhaps hundreds if not thousands of brokers, money managers, portfolio managers. And it's extremely difficult to detect without the right set of tools. And that occurs to the tune of somewhere between 4 to 8 billion dollars per year worth of losses to the information industry."

Cranium Softworks is in the business of selling tools to companies to prevent those losses...detecting how many people are logged on ...at a time using a single account. For many people..it's a kind of theft...they had never considered stealing. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.