That is the latest warning from the industry-funded organisation.
According to chairman Jim Macnamara, the watchdog is currently receiving an unprecedented 200 telephone queries a month related to software piracy. More than one-third of those are related to multimedia companies suspected of using of pirated software, he said.
Macnamara said the BSAA was allowed by law to physically raid a company's premises without warning and seize any equipment suspected to house illegal software.
Australian law allows this concession in any well-evidenced case involving suspected theft of -easily-destroyable" intellectual property, not just software, he said.
Macnamra said the BSAA, which is fuelled mostly on cash supplied by large international software companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Adobe, tended to take legal action against smaller multimedia companies with no fulltime employees in charge of managing software licences.
He said those companies were more likely to use pirated software - knowingly or otherwise - because they operated in a fast-growing industry climate, with no staff that specialised in software licencing.
-Creatives tend to be not that good on the financial side, not that good at business management, and not that good at licencing management," he said.
-There's nobody in charge of the IT, until it breaks."
Nevertheless, the BSAA typically squeezes more than AU$100,000 apiece from around five Australian companies a month that use unlicenced software, a cost Macnamara acknowledges -can have a fairly disastrous impact on a business."
