Who wants play pirates?
Posted on November 04, 2015
Recently a client contacted me after receiving a letter from lawyers representing the Business Software Alliance (BSA).
The BSA is an alliance of the world’s most powerful and prolific software companies such as Microsoft, Adobe (their most famous products are Acrobat and Photoshop), Apple and Autodesk (they have AutoCad), Cisco, Oracle, Symantec and Trend to name a few.
The BSA was formed many years ago and its mission is to “educate businesses and consumers on software management and copyright protection”. When they are not doing that, they take action against users of unauthorised software. They are very powerful and very cashed up.
In case you don’t know, unauthorised software (aka pirated software) is software that you should be paying to use but you are not. There is loads of it out there and employees are very good at personalising their PC at work by installing all of their favourite software and very often they haven’t paid for a licence to do so. Also well meaning IT guys (and gals) sometimes just grab a disc and install the necessary software to get a machine up and running but they never get around to buying a licence. It is so easy to do.
I won’t get into the debate about whether or not having to pay for software is “fair” because as the law currently stands, licence fees are certainly payable and software companies have the right to require you to pay them.
You might think that there is no pirated software in your business but that is something you should not take for granted.
BSA accepts anonymous tip-offs so in effect they have spies all over the place. It only takes one disgruntled former employee or customer to allege that you have pirated software and make that call and, before you know it, you will receive a letter from BSA’s lawyers.
The letter will say that they have information that you have pirated software and they will demand that you conduct an audit of all of their members’ software that is installed on your computers and report back to them.
That process is painful enough but when you are doing it under threat of legal action, it is even worse.
It does not pay to ignore such a letter because if you do, BSA would likely commence court action against you and the next thing you know you could have a bunch of lawyers knocking on your door bearing a Court order that authorises them to search and even seize your hardware.
Equally it does not pay to try to respond to this sort of letter without first taking legal advice. Trust me, there is a right way and there are many, many wrong ways to respond to this sort of letter.
In the case of my client they had to go over their hardware and work out what they had installed and what they had licences for and the answer was not good. There was quite a bit of pirate software there and they had to go out and get licences for it and pay damages for their past use. That’s right, it wasn’t enough to just buy licences for the future they had to pay extra.
The outcome was very expensive. If they had been on top of their licences they would have saved loads of money and time.
So you really should avoid the BSA by getting compliant. How do you do that?
A software audit is something you should do right now and then you should make sure that your IT people stay on top of your software usage ensuring that licence fees are paid and that no pirate software is installed on your hardware.
You also need an IT policy for your employees which makes it very clear that you will not permit or tolerate the use of pirate software in your business.
This is not something you can ignore and so I encourage you to give me a call so that we can set up an audit and some policies for you to save you big bucks and big disruption (not to mention big legal bills) if the BSA comes-a-knocking.
Now, altogether now in your best pirate voice repeat after me – “We don’t want no pirates around here”.
