Windows 7 will come in five different editions including Starter, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate.

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.

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.

Both software providers are concerned that ALI is considering a guideline that would make the assumption that all software should be shipped with no defects, and that this should be considered a de facto warranty.

TYhe ALI is made up of members from the American legal establishment, which draws up guidelines for judges that explain how the law should be applied in legal cases. This week the group meets to finalise the Principles of the Law of Software Contracts.

Anybody with a sizeable investment in HP / Compaq notebooks now faces the unenviable task of having to determine exactly what machines they have in their inventory, who has hold of them and where in the organization they are. For anyone with a network of more than 500 or so PCs, that’s going to be quite a task.

Thankfully, good Discovery can dramatically ease the task at hand, by presenting IT managers with an accurate inventory of exactly what PCs are on the network. Tools like Centennial Discovery can even identify individual models, making it far easier to determine exactly which PCs on the corporate network are affected by the recall.

In 2006, Sony initiated a massive recall of batteries, which were at risk of over-heating and catching fire. Some airlines even banned notebook use during flight for safety reasons.

A list of affected HP and Compaq notebook models can be found here.

According to the BSA, this was because: “…PC shipments grew fastest in high-piracy countries such as China and India, overwhelming progress elsewhere”.

The USA continues to have the lowest reported rate of software piracy, but the sheer scale of the market means it also accounts for some of the highest losses, with the BSA claiming that vendors are losing out on up to US $9.1 billion in revenues.

The UK saw its piracy rate rise by a single point to 27 percent - a reversal of the drop seen in 2008.

While many commentators point to the global economy as one potential cause for the increase in overall piracy, it’s also worth taking a moment to consider the sheer level of complexity involved in managing multiple vendor licensing schemes. With no two schemes the same, and confusion at the end user level as to how to best choose and structure agreements, many organisations commit piracy unintentionally. Thankfully, there is a well-developed Software Asset Management (SAM) channel in place in most territories that can help. Maybe now is a good time to have a chat with an expert about your licensing…