Alan wrote:
On Fri, April 25, 2008 10:10 am, John Oliver wrote:
How about tell the BSA auditors^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthugs "No, thank you, we
aren't interested" and closing the door in their face? They aren't a
government agency. They cannot compel you to do anything. And on what
basis are they going to get law enforcement to get a warrant to force an
entry?
The BSA has been known to show up with the local Sherrif in tow to enforce
a court-ordered audit.
-ajb
If I remember correctly. the BSA bases it's authority on Federal law,
and they don't come in with the local Sheriff, they show up with U.S.
Marshalls holding a Federal warrant. The warrant is for suspicion of
criminal activity: if you all remember about ten years or longer ago,
Congress passed legislation making illicit software copying/use a
federal crime punishable by some undgodly amount of money and a decade
or more in Federal prison.
Originally, the law was written such the the alleged value of the
purloined software had to be in the thousands of dollars to justify a
warrant. I think that has recently been changed to a much, much lower
amount.
And they don't just look for Microsoft products, they ask for licenses
for EVERY piece of software they find. The easy way to avoid such an
audit is to run a non-M$ OS as they have their own custom-written
auditing software which they run on every box in the house. AFAIK, it
only runs in Windows and MS-DOS.
The poster-child for BSA door-busting in San Diego was Jenny Craig. I
think they settled for around a hundred or so computers running copies
of Windows from a single license. I think the settlement was in the
neighborhood of of $1000 per violation.
So you can see that the BSA (one of whose founding members is M$) is a
lucrative business in and of itself. They have been regularly running
radio adverts since the mid '90's encouraging people to rat out their
employers.
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
