Modern Pirates is your fast-track resource for gaining a consumer perspective--and discovering proactive defensive strategies--on the legal games being played by the copyright protected industry players. The games are serious and will cost you enormous amounts of money. Be forewarned--YOU are a piracy audit target. The link to the TOC and sample chapter is below this introduction.
Just
when you thought the software piracy game had reached the completely
insane mark, the copyright enforcement industry announces new heights
of customer service. I meant to bring this up a while ago, but
something inside me kept saying: "It's just a bad dream. It isn't
really true."
Unfortunately, true is the
operative word. You see, not long ago the SIIA & BSA both raised their software
piracy whistleblower rewards to a cap of $1,000,000. Naturally, this
amount only appears to be valid in the United States. You remember the US? It's one of
the countries with the lowest piracy rates in the world? As I suggest
in Modern Pirates, it continues to appear that American
businesses - more financially capable of paying ludicrous fines &
penalties - are funding the so-called global "war on piracy."
But
wait: There's more. SIIA announced that during December of 2006
its auditing teams collected software piracy settlements in the amount
of $1,000,000 from eleven (American?) companies. While this is a
far cry from the BSA's "2 Million Dollar Tuesday" campaign of July
2006, it's still a healthy chunk of cash liberated from those scurvy
American software piracy wanna be's.
So... Be
sure to do your part to help fight the "war on piracy." Buy more
operating systems & software. Be sure to buy hardware that has
been pre-loaded with whatever copyright protected products the hardware
provider wants to place on the drives. Continue to ignore license
requirements & limitations. Don't retain critical product
documentation. And, most importantly, place plenty of shareware on
your systems then forget it's there after the eval licenses expire.
Finally, terminate plenty of employees who know the details of your
tech environment, then be sure to give them the anti piracy toll free
numbers on their way out the door.
On
the other hand, you could choose to not contribute to the enforcement
industry's nicely comfortable standard of living. You could
properly monitor the entire life cycle of ALL copyright protected
products in your tech environment. In fact, if you actually begin
this proactive asset management process, you will most likely discover (as a majority of businesses do)
that your IT costs begin to drop because investments are more carefully
planned & monitored. But then, just maybe your company management
enjoys seeing its name in the press associated with software piracy or
copyright piracy - not to mention the opportunity to deliver hundreds
of thousands of dollars to outside copyright enforcement entities.
By
the way whistle-blowers - don't plan on getting your hands on that $1,000,000 reward
for reporting software piracy any time soon. According to the SIIA,
during 2006, the period where their cap was up to $200,000, their
actual reward delivery averaged $4,618 per settlement to seventeen
whistleblowers. But that is a story for another posting.
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