ZDNet Australia has just received confirmation that Future School settled out of court with the Business Software Association of Australia (BSAA), to a tune of AU$40,000. The claim related to illegal use of Microsoft, Adobe and Symantec software.
Future School refused to comment on the settlement.
The BSAA also plans to target Australian small businesses on software privacy, warning companies which don't get the message of the threat of court action.
The BSAA, which touts itself as an industry body aimed at protecting intellectual property, plans to launch a new campaign in April that will target small and medium sized businesses (SMEs).
BSAA chairman Jim Macnamara described the new campaign as having -both a carrot and a stick".
On the one hand the BSAA will run a round of advertising and promotion, aimed at upping the awareness of illegal software use in the SME sector.
However, Macnamara also indicated that the BSAA had plans to increase the number of legal actions it pursued. -The second part of this campaign is a warning that we won't go soft on small business," he said. -We plan to take action against a number of small business."
-If they don't take the warnings then there's going to be repercussions," he warned. -We've been targeting it for a while and we have taken action against some small businesses in the last year."
Macnamara confirmed the BSAA had court cases underway at the moment, but refused to elaborate. -At any given time there is usually at least half a dozen cases under way," he said.
Macnamara said BSAA research had found that Australia's average piracy rate across all industries was at 33 percent, higher than the estimated 26 percent in both the UK and US. He also believes that in some small business sectors, such as graphic or Web design, it reaches rates of more than 60 percent.
The bottom line is that the BSAA has no legal right to request the information they do. Their intimidation tactics should be ignored.
They send out 100,000s of letters, demanding you send them details of the software and matching serial numbers, when they have no right to demand it.
The company I worked for, didn't even have any software from the companies they represent, yet they sent us the letter and demanded we comply, or be threaten with legal action. Repeated letters were sent but we just ignored them. They have yet to follow up their threat because it was based on assumption, not fact!
BSAA needs to clean up their act before everyone releases they are just the IT version of Ambulance chasers.
Rob