I was sent this by our colleagues at PTI. Just a little reminder about how seriously the software industry is now taking software piracy. February 3, 2000, Thursday, AM cycle HEADLINE: City of Issaquah fined for using illegally-copied software BYLINE: By MICHAEL J. MARTINEZ, AP Business Writer DATELINE: ISSAQUAH, Wash. BODY: The popular image of software piracy - illegally-copied CD-ROMs sold from the back of a truck - hardly matches reality. Some mainstream organizations don't even realize they're doing anything illegal. The City of Issaquah says it's one of those organizations. Officials of the Seattle suburb claim they didn't know they had failed to purchase enough licenses for its computer software. In a settlement announced Thursday, the city agreed to pay an $80,000 fine to the Business Software Alliance, a software industry watchdog group. "The reality is that most companies lose money because of illegally-copied or unlicensed software in the workplace," said Bob Kruger, BSA vice-president of enforcement. Issaquah mayor Ava Frisinger said the city simply didn't realize it needed to purchase different kinds of licenses when it moved from a Novell Inc. operating system to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT system, despite the fact that Microsoft is notoriously upfront and strict about its licenses. "With Novell, we could just add software to computers as long as we monitored its use," Frisinger said. "Microsoft required separate licenses for each computer, and we just didn't realize it." The BSA was tipped off to Issaquah's problems in late 1998. A subsequent audit conducted by the city found there were licensing problems not only with Windows NT, but other software products from Microsoft, Adobe Systems Inc., Autodesk Inc. and Symantec Corp. Over the past few months, the city, which is just south of Microsoft's Redmond headquarters and is home to numerous technology workers, agreed to destroy the illegal copies it made of its software and buy new copies according to each company's licensing agreements. The alternative was a lawsuit from the BSA and the software industry. Frisinger noted she was able to talk the fine down from $400,000 to $80,000. "Sure, we'd like to have the money to use for other things, but it's important that we comply with the law," Frisinger said. Cutting corners in order to save money is the biggest culprit in computer piracy, Kruger said. Piracy can be, and often is, the simple act of putting a program on disk and passing it over the cubicle wall to a co-worker. "We don't think a lot of this is truly malicious, but at the same time, if your computer isn't working, you don't go out and steal another one off a truck," Kruger said. "We have to change the way people think about this issue." Computer piracy causes $2 billion in lost revenue every year in the United States alone, Kruger estimated.
