June 1st, 2009 by Matt Fisher
Following its claim that businesses in London UK use as much as £149 million (US $244.3m) worth of unlicensed software, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced that it is launching a new campaign aimed at the British capital. This follows similar campaigns in other parts of the UK.
The two-month campaign will encourage London businesses to audit their own software use to determine whether they are safely within legal boundaries.
According to London’s ‘Metro’ newspaper, this news comes as the BSA has reached a £10,000 settlement with a London-based architects firm which was found to have illegal software on its network.
Meanwhile, in the USA, the BSA has announced a $205,000 settlement with a Nevada-based civil engineering company which was found to be using illegal copies of Autodesk software. According to news reports, the company first refused to co-operate with the BSA on a software audit, which led to the licensing watchdog filing a lawsuit in the Californian courts.
Posted in Software Audit, BSA |
May 29th, 2009 by Matt Fisher
According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Manufacturing industry is the worst sector in the US economy for effectively managing its software assets. The BSA investigated confidential reports of software piracy across the US to determine the top-ten market sectors for software mis-management. The top five industries emerged as Manufacturing, Sales/Distribution, Service, Financial Services and (perhaps somewhat ironically!) Software Development.
The inclusion of Financial Services in the top five will surprise many, as this industry is no stranger to codes of practice and strict regulations. However, it is the ease with which an organization can find itself in breach of compliance laws that is perhaps the key consideration here - it is all to easy to install unlicensed software on the network or to purchase appliations through illegitimate means.
This highlights the need for effective SAM within end user organizations - not only to check the volume of licenses held against the number of applications discovered on the network, but also to ensure that software is being purchased through the correct channels and that organisations are not over-paying for software they don’t need, or is no longer in use.
Posted in BSA, Piracy, Software Licence Management |
April 20th, 2009 by Matt Fisher
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) has announced that it intends to invest in both enforcement and education activities in the second half of 2009. In addition to continuing with its regional licensing ‘clamp downs’ (which have concentrated on Glasgow and Manchester recently), the vendor-funded watchdog will also push a program it calls ‘SAM Advantage’.
This program will be trialled initially in Canada, the US and Australia before being imported to the UK before the end of 2009.
While many will appreciate the BSA’s efforts to complement its enforcement activities with preventatitve training, it is also possible that the latest program will be seen as uneccessary additional noise in an increasingly crowded SAM market. Many other vendors and SAM specialists already offer training - and while choice is undoubtedly a good thing, too many voices offering different approaches could lead to confusion (and therefore a lack of adoption) among end user organizations.
Posted in SAM, BSA |