201602.16
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How To Survive A Software Licensing Audit

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Lisa Morgan, InformationWeek, 1/1/16 Enterprise IT organizations face software audits as a matter of doing business with large technology vendors. What’s the best approach to dealing with them? Here’s a look at what you should and shouldn’t do when you get that software licensing audit notice.

201602.16
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Software Licensing Audits: Is Your Company Prepared?

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Lisa Morgan, InformationWeek, 12/31/15 Software licensing audits can cause minor annoyance or excruciating pain, depending on their scope and how ready your enterprise is for the disruption and expense. We take a look at trends in software licensing audits and the ways they impact your IT organization and your business.

201602.01
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What You Need to Know if You Receive a Letter from BSA | The Software Alliance

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Preparing the BSA Audit Materials BSA | The Software Alliance’s primary enforcement tool is to send a threatening letter indicating that an investigation has commenced and offering to forego litigation if the target company provides a self-audit. A self-audit consists of a listing of all BSA member software running on a company’s computer networks, appropriate…

201601.01
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When to Seek Help for a BSA | The Software Alliance Audit

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Many companies choose to pursue an internal audit of software systems after receiving a request from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). When it comes to deciding how to proceed with an audit, there are multiple considerations, including, but not limited to, the size of the company, amount of computers, type of software at issue, IT…

201511.20
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4 Tips for Surviving Software Audits

Wendy McMahone, CDWG, 11/20/215 With software makers such as IBM promising customers a licensing compliance review at least once every two years, undergoing a software audit isn’t a question of if, but of when. Robert Scott, managing partner of Scott & Scott, a Texas-based law firm specializing in software audits, says the risk of an…

201308.14
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Software License Management for the Modern Enterprise

CDW Whitepaper, 2013 Remarkably, only about 20 percent of organizations have a formal software management program in place, according to consulting firm Ernst & Young. And more than half continue to use spreadsheets to manage software licenses, according to the research firm Opinion Matters. Although technology professionals have long voiced concerns about the consequences of poor software license…

201208.14
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Managing Software License Disputes: Cooperation or Litigation

Robert J. Scott, The Licensing Journal, August 2012 Cooperate or litigate? That’s the question company executives must answer when software publishers claim that the company is violating the terms of its software licenses. In our experience, the best strategy depends on a variety of legal and business factors. This article discusses common software dispute resolution frameworks and concludes that a combined approach…

201111.21
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What I Learned in the Last 10 Years Defending BSA | The Software Alliance Audits

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I am an intellectual property attorney in Southlake, Texas who has handled more than 230 Business Software Alliance audit matters for small to medium-sized companies. For the last ten years, I have been representing end-user companies nationally in software audit matters initiated by major software publishers including Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, IBM and their trade groups…

201108.14
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How to defend against software audits successfully

Robert J. Scott, WestLaw Journal, 2011 Shrinking budgets for information technology and fierce competition among software publishers have created explosive growth in the incidence and frequency of software audits, a mechanism by which software publishers investigate their customers to determine whether they are in compliance with software licenses and copyright laws.

201105.14
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7 Software Audit Secrets

Robert J. Scott, Enterprise Features, May 2011 I am a lawyer that represents businesses in software audit cases initiated by software publishers and their trade groups including Business Software Alliance and the SIIA. I work with a team of lawyers and technology professionals defending software license disputes involving Microsoft, IBM, Autodesk, Oracle and Adobe. My clients range from global…