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$1 million reward…report the sale of illegal software over the Internet!
By Jon Gillespie-Brown | May 7, 2008
I am very happy to report that the BSA have announced they are stepping up their campaigns with the addition of Internet based software pirates.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is announcing the expansion of its $1 million rewards program to include those that report the sale of illegal software over the Internet, such as in the case of auctions of unlicensed software.
This simply means that this source of "revenue leakage" will start to get eroded faster in my view, I expect most people are reporting piracy because it affects them or their business but it great that think that people now get a ‘pat on the back’ for doing the right thing.
In 2007, BSA shut down over 13,800 online auctions offering more than 50,500 individual software products. The total retail value of those software products was approximately $13.3 million. Nearly two-thirds of the online auctions shut down were on U.S. auction sites. The number of auctions removed in the first three months of 2008 increased by nearly three-fold vs. the same period in 2007.
“Piracy over the Internet has increased both in breadth and sophistication in the last few years, and requires us to increase our efforts to combat the issue,” continued MacBride. “BSA and its members feel strongly that it’s time to extend our rewards program to include those that report the sale of illegal software over the Internet so that we make the Internet a safer and secure medium.”
The only sad thing we find talking with many ISV’s is that so many are ignorant of the effects of piracy to their organizations, even a quick Google search with their app name and ‘crack’ often reveals dozens of sites selling their software they didn’t even know about.
Internet based piracy has to be the worst for smaller vendors as its so easy to do, in fact many are affected without the cracker really having to do very much hard core hacking, they haven’t even bothered with rudimentary protection and so it’s simply a case of copying a binary, setting up on eBay, copying marketing blurb from the ISV web site and away the thieves go - they can do this in an afternoon and the chances of getting caught are so small its worth the risk.
At least the BSA are attempting to tackle the issue and so I say "well done to them".
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October 7th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Whilst internet can act as medium in distributing pirated software, it can also act as the medium that distributes the pure and legal softwares..
The open source and freeware, they are really worth comparable to the commercial softwares.
It’s no longer as the ‘alternatives’ but also a complete replacement. So please we can stop these piracy thing by using open source and freeware.
October 9th, 2008 at 10:48 am
believe the total value of pirated software globally is far surpass the 13.3 million.
Thinking about current economic crisis, would IT/software industry give contribution to the rebound process?
Hope opensource and freeware help many of us.