It sounds like it's a real problem, but they picked an aweful case study to highlight.

The guy's 30 employees were repeatedly downloading pirated software, and the lesson he learned after the first audit was to quickly delete the software right before the auditors came. I'm not surprised the industry group passed his name around as someone who might plausibly have pirated other company's software.

In my understanding, businesses, in theory should never use unlicensed proprietary software. If they want to cut costs, they should use free software. There are almost always free alternatives, which may or may not lack features available in their paid alternatives. If they badly want those software, they should try to increase their revenue using free software and then switch to paid.