HUNDREDS of Birmingham businesses are being targeted by an agency seeking to root out software piracy.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) says 27% of all software used in businesses is either unlicensed or pirated – and it is targeting the city because it is a software piracy ‘hotspot’, accounting for more than 15% of all the piracy reports the BSA receives in the UK.
Its Birmingham campaign will see 1,000 businesses from all sectors contacted, and runs until the end of the year. It is taking a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to business owners and senior managers, by offering advice as well as threatening potential legal action.
Julian Swan, BSA’s director in charge of compliance marketing, said the agency wanted to help businesses understand software licensing issues and introduce policies to manage the issue, but that companies that were ‘persistent offenders’ could face court action to recover lost fees.
“Businesses take care to manage their other assets such as a car fleet,” he said. “They know how many cars they have and when they need servicing. I don’t see it’s anything different with software licences.”
SMEs and growing companies were most at risk of falling foul of licensing rules, he said, because they didn’t have large IT and finance departments to manage compliance issues. “Quite often you’ll have one person doing several jobs, and licensing issues can get overlooked.
“The most common infringement is when a company has a 10-seat licence for a piece of software, but then as the company grows, they forget to change the licence at the same time.”
Mr Swann rejected the suggestion that the campaign by the BSA – which is funded by software giants such as Microsoft – will put pressure on companies already struggling to maintain cashflow as the economy emerges from recession.
“Software is an industry too – If we reduce piracy from 27% to 17% over a four-year period, we reckon there will be another 13,000 highly paid jobs in the country.”
The commercial value of pirated software installed in the UK last year alone was £1billion, he said.
Information and resources for business can be found on the BSA’s website here
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