Christopher Danzig, Inside Counsel, 7/1/2009 Imagine you head a small company, with just a few dozen employees and computers. One day you receive a letter from a software industry trade group, such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) or the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), informing you that it knows your company has unlicensed…
Robert J. Scott, The Advocate, 2008 Shrinking IT budgetsts, fierce competition and a mature software market have increased the motivation for software publishers (such as Microsoft Corp., Adobe Systems Inc., Oracle) to conduct software licensing audits – demanding that their customers demonstrate ownership of licenses for all software installed on their computers. Software audits can…
Ericka Chickowski, Baseline, 01/18/2008 Let’s face it, software asset management (SAM) might be a best practice, but there are still plenty of organizations out there who haven’t instituted SAM due to a lack of resources or initiative. If your organization is one of them and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) hasn’t come calling yet, there’s…
Robert J. Scott, The SciTech Lawyer, 2006 Shrinking IT budgets 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 if they are in compliance with software licenses and copyright laws. In addition to developing internal enforcement operations, many publishers have engaged trade associations to perform enforcement activity under…
Kathleen Melymuka, Computerworld, 06/12/2006 Robert J Scott, managing partner of US legal and technology services firm Scott & Scott, gives a lowdown on how to handle software audits. “There are two types of companies: those that have been audited [for software violations] and those that will be.” So says Robert J Scott, managing partner of…
Scott Leibs, CFO Magazine, 02/01/2006 December was a bad month for software pirates. Nathan Peterson, accused of selling millions of dollars’ worth of vastly discounted software via the Web, pleaded guilty to two counts of copyright infringement and agreed to pay more than $5 million in restitution to nearly two dozen companies, including CA, Symantec…
