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Why the BSA Is Less Reviled Than the RIAA
Hugh Pickens writes "The Business Software Alliance (BSA) is a trade group established in 1988 representing a number of the world's largest software makers whose principal activity is trying to stop copyright infringement of software produced by its members, performing roughly the same function for the software industry that the RIAA performs for the music industry. Yet, as Bill Patry, author of a 7-volume treatise on US copyright law and currently Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, notes on his blog the BSA is a 'far less unpopular organization' than the RIAA because there are three key differences between the BSA's campaigns and the RIAA's. First, BSA's members have always offered their products for sale to the public, through any channel that wants to sell them. Second, BSA's members are consumer-oriented; they try to develop products that respond to consumers' needs, and not, the reverse: focusing on what they want to sell to consumers. Third, because consumers can easily purchase BSA's members products, those who copy without paying are simply scofflaws. 'I think the fact that the public does not object to BSA's campaign proves my point [that]... people do not want things for free; they are willing to pay for them,' writes Patry. 'It should not be surprising that when consumers are not treated with respect, they react negatively. That's something the software industry learned long ago, and that's why people don't object to the BSA's enforcement campaign.'"
Isn't it also possible that a significant volume of the online debate over the years against the RIAA/MPAA has been by technologically savvy folks, say perhaps people in IT? And why would these people want to bite the hand that feeds them, their own software alliance?
I am not so sure the BSA's actions to date are 100% responsible for the muted reaction to their approach to software piracy. I postulate that folks that want to sell software are more likely to support them, and the folks that want to sell CDs and Movies simply aren't in a position to influence the debate the way IT folks are.
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Software has an intrinsic value. To a business, the return on investment from a piece of software is something that can be measured. Spreadsheet software, for example, makes accounting many times easier and cheaper than trying to keep the books in books.
But music (and to a lesser degree video) has no intrinsic value. It is something enjoyed passing time. Like a frisbee at the park or a cup holder in a car. It's something that is nice to have but ultimately unnecessary.
If anti-copyright proponents would be unhypocritical, they would demand that software be downloadable for "sharing" among friends. That they only make this claim for music shows and video shows that there is a fundamental difference between software and music in their minds. I attribute this to the ephemeral nature of music, something which can be enjoyed but in the end has no real value.
The BSA is busting kids that share 5800 NDS roms. They are also going after the Big Warez sharers.
But they mostly focus on businesses because a company will roll over and play dead for them 99% of the time. It's like free money for them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I was surprised by the headline. The BSA's tactic of requiring companies to be audited and then pay large amounts for any product that they can't prove that they own makes them pretty unpopular. The only difference is that they chase companies rather than individuals, so to most individuals they are irrelevant. If you run a small business, I suspect you'll have a lot more hostility towards the BSA than the RIAA. Being able to avoid interacting with the BSA is a very strong argument for persuading a company to adopt an open source stack.
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I think the BSA are largely less hated because it is less well known than the RIAA. The fact that it rarely targets individuals is probably part of this. If you don't run a small-to-medium sized business, the BSA are unlikely to really be on your radar. But small business owners who've interacted with the BSA hate them at least as much as your average Slashdot reader hates the RIAA.
The BSA's tactic of requiring companies to be audited and then pay large amounts for any product that they can't prove that they own makes them pretty unpopular.
They seem to be a pretty popular way for disgruntled IT employees to screw over their employer though. Every BSA audit I've ever heard of or been involved in came about because of some employee or ex-employee with an axe to grind.
I've always wondered what happens if you refuse to let them onto your property. Presumably their only recourse would be to sue you and obtain access to your computer systems through the discovery process. Given the "speed" with which the court system moves I wonder if you could have the whole operation switched over an open source movement by the time it reached that point?
Alternatively what happens if you claim trade secrets or privacy restrictions (HIPAA?) on your computer system?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Part of the problem, I think, is the fact that the RIAA are abusing the copyright bargain, while the BSA are not. In most places copyright (quite properly) is not a "moral right". It is a voluntary concession on the side of the general public in order to encourage authors to publish, for the public's benefit. The public clearly wishes to be able to privately share music, create new mixes and share these too. Would this discourage the production of music? since nearly all musicians make their money from live performances with the recordings basically serving as advertizing, the answer is no. Thus changing the terms of the bargain (allowing for free private non-commercial dealing in at least some kinds of works) is the right things to do. Moreover, the public seems to treat commercial and non-commercial use of copyrighted works differently; copyright law basically assumes that infringement will only happen on a large commercial scale (hence you can get statutory damages of $150K per work infringed without proving actual damages [this requires proving "wilful infringement" which seems easy in practice). The BSA thus follows the model the public likes. In fact, they like some level of private copying: they recognize that not every illegal copy equals a lost sale, and would rather entrench their products (especially Microsoft with their OS monopoly) with customers who would otherwise not pay for them. Just like college students with "illegal" copies of professional software suites on their home computers will in the future buy this expensive software once they have a job (that's the software they are used to, after all), I'm sure that many college students will buy music CDs once they have the income to do so. Until then giving them "free samples" is the way to go.
My understanding is that if you refuse them access, they'll show up with a sheriff and a court order allowing them access.
We went through one of Microsoft's SAM not-an-audit-but-really-an-audit last spring. I had taken over the tech position, and everything had been in a bloody mess. Worse, most of the licenses had belonged to the organization which the organization I work for had bought. Naturally, there were many supposed licenses which the former tech guy had assured me existed which did not exist, and I ended up uninstalling about fifteen copies of Office 2003 Pro because I simply could not find any evidence that they had been purchased. Fortunately I had several copies of Office Basic and the like (mainly they need Outlook anyways), so I managed to keep within the licenses that I actually had physical evidence of.
Of course, the MS SAM guys are pricks. There was about two months of back-and-forth, and in the end my "rep" (or so this turkey insisted he was) claimed that five of my Server 2003 CALs weren't strictly valid because they were put on a volume license version of Server 2003, and they were retail CALs, and I was either going to have to change them to device CALs or buy five new ones through volume licensing.
At that point I got really pissed off and basically told the guy he was just trying to nitpick to try to get me to spend a couple of hundred bucks for licenses that we already owned, and for which Microsoft had already been paid. The guy did back off, though I think he was pretty pissed that he hadn't got a dime out of us. I in fact did need more licenses for a file server, but after my experience with Microsoft's license extortion department, I said "fuck it", installed a Samba member server, finally mastered Posix-to-Windows ACL mapping, and basically could give a shit. I'm down to one DC per location, enough to handle authentication and roaming profiles, I've installed OpenOffice wherever I can, and basically have no intention of buying any more MS products.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Every member company of BSA has been found to have 'unauthorized software' [citation needed] but of course those aren't reported to the media like the rest.
I did asset and software management for 15 years before finally being able to dump the whole mess on someone else. Every license was tied to a purchase order and every purchase order was tied to a machine. Whenever we got a new Microsoft rep (since they were the majority of our products) I would show them the huge lateral filing cabinets with every license in order. Yeah, they're going to try to pull an audit on us.
I did get a call from the Microsoft 'legal' department once trying to tell us that we didn't have enough Exchange licenses for a company our size. When I asked which company, since we had 15 affiliates, they couldn't tell me. And when I told them that only 2 affiliates used Exchange and the rest were Lotus Notes they got truly confused. At which point I essentially told them to fuck off until they could get their facts straight. Surprisingly I never heard back.
Yes, the BSA uses disgruntled employees as their main source of information and they pay for it. They're evil and while I have no pity for companies that buy one license and install on fifty machines the BSA tactics and fine structure completely suck.
Maybe if the RIAA would sue for reasonable amounts, say $3 / song or something like that they'd be taken a bit more seriously.
I mention $3 only because this would be the equivalent to the BSA system, which fines the guilty party 3x the retail value of the product they pirated. Not 100 or 1000x like the RIAA seems to enjoy charging.
BSA says: Pirate a piece of software worth $200, pay $600 fine.
RIAA says: Pirate 1 song worth $1.25, pay $15,000 fine.
Something's a bit off with those numbers if you ask me.
The BSA does all sorts of nasty things (like claiming that a company that makes detection equipment was hoarding explosives), but when they come after you, you're frequently guilty, and even their balls to the walls fines don't compare to the current $18k/song madness we've been seeing.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's even worse for books. I haven't read a dead-tree book in a while. Instead, I load the text into the Orca screen reader, and play it at high speed (about 460 words per minute). There are tons of texts out there that are only available in encrypted form, and many that aren't legally available on the Internet at all. Shame on those publishers and authors! How do blind people buy their products? What I've settled on for books that are not legally available in unencrypted form is buying the real thing or a license to the encrypted version, and then downloading the illegal version. There's one author I particularly like that I'm thinking of sending $100, with a letter asking him to be more open with his works. His poor judgement has turned his entire life's work into a very popular free download, while insulting the blind, and causing guys like me a lot of grief.
Anyway, I agree with the author that the BSA is not nearly as hated an organisation, partly because the software industry reacted less stupidly to the pirating. Book publishers are next on the list of casualties, and once again, it's much their own fault. They are busy giving Amazon a monopoly on e-books, just like the music industry did when they handed distribution to Apple. Good luck negotiating a fair deal with Amazon when they are the only game in town. Personally, I will gladly buy music from Amazon, since I can play it on my Linux box, or anywhere I like. I will never buy a Kindle book, or a song from Apple, so long as they are locked to the vendor's devices. The book industry needs to get a clue and learn a few lessons from the software and music industries.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
I have a friend who is an attorney. He has a small office that has at most 5 people working in it at any given time. He and I have been friends for years and he comes to me for computer related problems or advice. He lives in absolute terror of the BSA. He has never been visited by them, yet he still fears them. He is paranoid beyond belief that maybe, somehow, he might have one piece of software installed on an office PC that wasn't paid for and a disgruntled employee with a grudge will try to get the BSA to visit him and he will get hit with a fine for tens of thousands of dollars. He buys every piece of software he's got. If you can believe this, to save a few dollars he bought Adobe Acrobat (lawyers use PDF files for legal submissions) from some guy on Ebay. He bought 2 copies. Both were OEM. He tried to get them activated by Adobe and got some grief over them being OEM. You would not believe how much he worried about it and he said that in the future he would pay Adobe's full price just to not have to worry about it. The vendor provided a new license key for each copy that Adobe accepted and activated, but my friends is still absolutely paranoid that he is going to get screwed over this.
He refuses to run free software because of his BSA paranoia. He is paranoid that if he doesn't buy it, he'll get screwed by the BSA. The reality is that as a small business owner, he pays rock bottom wages to the people (almost always women) who work as a paralegals for him and he offers no benefits that I know of. Consequently, he doesn't keep people very long. It's really easy for them to find better paying jobs elsewhere. And his office is in a small town so it would be fair to say that he doesn't get the best and brightest to work for him and sometimes employees leave under bad circumstances. They get angry about something and quit. So the BSA has effectively made this small businessman so paranoid that he never considers free software as he is afraid that somehow he might violate some law by using it and he pays full price for everything he buys just for peace of mind and he still fears the BSA knocking on his door and somehow finding one program without a license on a PC at his office. Their tactics may be different from the RIAA but I don't know anybody who fears the RIAA the way my friend and presumably others fear the BSA.
Nonsense. This is precisely the problem the article describes. Just publish in PDF. We all (customers, that is) want it in PDF. Every book reader out there can read it, and free translators exist for almost any format you want. Every other format out there for e-books is designed to keep the users from doing what we want, which is to copy it from one of my devices to another. Listen to what we customers want, and forget what you want to sell me. It's really pretty simple. I want to read it on my netbook, kindle, or smart-phone. I want my screen reader to speak it to me. Quit restricting me from using your books, and let me buy them!
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
BSA's members have always offered their products for sale to the public
A couple years ago I needed a specific version of Windows, in English, while being in a foreign country. It was not available for sale in said country, so I thought, I'll just go purchase it online. After a bit of googling, I was really surprised that I couldn't find it for sale as a downloadable ISO (I needed it on that very day). Finally on eBay I find an auction to "a link to a downloadable version of Windows with license". I instant pay and within one minute of each other I get 2 messages, one from the seller that gives me a link to a fake site with just written "download Windows with license" (and nothing else); and another one from eBay that states that the sale was pulled for breaking terms of service on software (what, after I pay ?!?), without even offering a refund.
Now call me naive, but on that day I learned 2 things: (1) Windows lost not only a sale but many customers since it was the very day that I started installing Linux on my customer's PCs because of their reluctance to sell online; (2) eBay actively encourages criminals and just do some handwaving to cover their ass.
Non-Linux Penguins ?