Re: Software Audit

On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Richard Turner <rturner[_at_]LUCE.COM> wrote:
>
> Has anyone on this list had any experience with a Software
> Publisher's Association audit? If so, I would appreciate hearing
> about your experiences.

I can't claim direct experience here, but I once shared the podium with the President of the SPA at a conference in Oregon. (Interestingly, a couple of months later he used the title of my talk as the title of a talk he gave in Boston, and without permission I might add ;). My apologies if my memory is a bit rusty here as this was about three years back.

At the time they had successfully litigated (as I recall) 200 cases losing only one. The average settlement was pretty chunky, I think.

They tended to initiate action based on evidence supplied by informants within companies, and the process basically consisted of entering the workplace with federal marshalls, doing a sweep (using some software-recognition software) of all the hard drives and servers on the premises and then asking for the company to show proof of purchase for all the licences in use. Whenever the company would come up showing greater software usage than acquisition, then some would settle out of court; others wouldn't.

Interestingly, the SPA would then plow much of the proceeds of the settlement back into making a bigger and better SPA. A couple of interesting things here: 1. some huge amount of software is shared illegally at the workplace representing a dollar figure with lots of digits in lost sales to the copyright holders 2. the losses are even bigger abroad 3. a main focus of the SPA is in educational initiative in copyright law as it pertains to software. 4. At the time, they seemed quite favorably disposed toward network license count strategies which enable sites to electronically lend software to a number of concurrent users based on legal counts that are centrally maintained.

On point 4 above, I'm not sure whether the lending laws pertaining to software would agree with this as fair use or not, or whether or not the library lending laws even apply to electronic lending schema, though fortunately the vast majority of the software industry seems to have embraced such strategies as a part of their licensure agreements (it ultimately tends to cut down on application sharing). I don't believe the White Paper addresses this, though I may be wrong.

David Dailey (ddailey[_at_]williams.edu) Received on Sat Mar 23 1996 - 19:50:37 GMT