Another Approach To Licensing Compliance

My blog posting from earlier talked about how the MPAA is trying to combat movie piracy.
I just visited the LinkedIn site and was intrigued to find an ad from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) offering up to $1,000,000…yes, US $1 million …for reporting illegal software and copyright infringements by organizations, by a distributor, or over the Internet.


Back in the early 1990’s it was common practice to illegally copy software and use within organizations; I have blogged about it multiple times, such as here.
As people and organizations became more aware of the illegality of pirated software, the practice has diminished greatly in some countries, but in many countries the amount of illegal software used is still in the 90% range.
In comparison with the MPAA “University Tool” I think this is a much better approach to catching offenders. It’s not perfect, true, but it does not potentially reveal your network traffic to basically anyone with a sniffer on the Internet.
The BSA approach motivates employees to “confidentially” report those guilty of software license infringement, and it motivates what could be anywhere from a small to a large percentage of potential software pirates to not make copies if they know their customers may report them.

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