Slashdot Mirror
Software Piracy At the Beijing Branch Office?
spirit_fingers writes "I'm the IT manager for a west coast design company that has a small branch office in Beijing with 5 employees, a few workstations and a couple of servers. Recently, it came to my attention that the Beijing office has been routinely installing and using pirated software on their computers — MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, mostly. We're very buttoned up about being legal with our software here at the home office, and I consider it unprofessional and risky for our Beijing office to be engaging in this practice. When I called the local office manager on this, he shrugged and replied, 'Well, every other shop here does it.' So I was wondering if there are any IT manager Slashdotters here in the the US who may have experienced something similar with their colleagues in APAC, and how they handle a situation like this." Click the link for more of this reader's thoughts on the subject.
Up until now, the powers that be here in the States have had a relatively laissez faire attitude about what goes on at the Beijing office and our accounting department hadn't noticed that Beijing never submitted receipts for software, until I questioned them about it.
I have no doubt that "everyone else does it" in that environment. Frankly, I could care less what those guys do with their personal computers, but when it comes to company-owned gear my attitude is to stay legal no matter what anyone else is doing. And it's not like they need to do it to save money: the Beijing branch turns a tidy profit. It just seems to be an attitude so firmly ingrained in the culture over there that no one gives it a second thought.
My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens. This came down today, so I'll give them a day or two to come up with something.
Up until now, the powers that be here in the States have had a relatively laissez faire attitude about what goes on at the Beijing office and our accounting department hadn't noticed that Beijing never submitted receipts for software, until I questioned them about it.
I have no doubt that "everyone else does it" in that environment. Frankly, I could care less what those guys do with their personal computers, but when it comes to company-owned gear my attitude is to stay legal no matter what anyone else is doing. And it's not like they need to do it to save money: the Beijing branch turns a tidy profit. It just seems to be an attitude so firmly ingrained in the culture over there that no one gives it a second thought.
My response (CC'd to our CFO) was to ask for copies of all receipts and serial numbers for the software they're using. and see what happens. This came down today, so I'll give them a day or two to come up with something.
Bollocks. Never seen it, or heard of it, except from software vendors trying to scare people. And I live in Hong Kong and have seen a fair sample of pirated software. Pirates are actually pretty good at customer service, most give full refund or exchange on demand. They have no interest in selling infected software, it would just rebound on them. Can't say it never happens, but there has been plenty of infected factory fresh legal software. The risk is not larger, in my experience.
When you say unfair to usa, you forget that those pirated softwares are exported using US prices, being charged to india/china/russia/brazil salaries.
A single copy of a software may cost as much as one year of an employee's salary there.
You're confusing the people who sell the stuff on the street/malls/markets with the people who crack the software and to some extent with the people who manufacture it. You're also making a mistake in assuming a modified binary in a software installer is something that an anti-virus/anti-malware program can necessarily detect. I've seen "clean" installs from commonly used and sold XP CD (in SE Asia) which contain keyloggers and so on from minute one. They were undetectable from the running machine but could be found by scanning from read only media such as live CD. The best way to get a rootkit onto many, many people's PCs is to have them install it along with the OS, or have the local PC retail industry helpfully do the work for you when they clone the pirated OS onto the newly purchased (without OS) PC using their cracked copy of Norton Ghost....and the distribution network of human vendors is efficient, motivated (profit), looks after its customers and broadly trusted. Perfect and beautiful! You pay now, wait 5 minutes.
We get more support requests for our software from China than from any other country - and we've never sold a single license there.
If the people using the software have no qualms in contacting the developers directly, then it seems to be a fairly entrenched problem that's going to take an awful lot to stamp out. Whilst talking about this topic many people may think 'windows+office' the fact is that piracy is affecting every developer large and small (and I work for a small one). I applaud anyone who takes an interest in stamping the problem out at their office, though unfortunately it's not going anyway anytime soon...