taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Patents: An anonymous contributor writes:

‘I just received this letter and these pre-addressed postcards in the post this morning. I was surprised when I saw the envelope, because I’d never received anything from the BSA before. It turned out that they had extracted my name and address from the European Patents database, because I registered a software patent once. So a lot of these letters have been probably been sent out.

According to the letter, from Francisco Mingorance, the draft directive is being turned around to ‘rob small businesses of their intellectual property assets’.

I find it hard to see how that could be true. However the BSA’s letter has an important message you should heed - it is critical to contact your European representatives (your MEP and your country’s Commissioner) within the next two weeks. Let them know that the European Union should curtail software patents for once and for all.

Get out your best stationery and write to your MEP at the address given on this page.

Make sure your message is short and clear. SME’s don’t benefit from patents. Few patents are held by SME’s and the cost of applying for, maintaining and defending them is crippling.’

jm: I would suggest noting that you support the position of rapporteur
Michel Rocard MEP, and/or the FFII — details here. Please do write!

• scanned JPEG of cover letter
• scanned JPEG of some of the postcards

BTW, the contributor also offers: ‘if anyone is interested in doctoring up the BSA postcards, I can provide the hi-res scans.’ ;)

Tags: bsa, contributor, european, jpeg, letter, mep, message, patents, post, sme, software

Spam: The Business Software Alliance, a UK anti-piracy body representing many of the major software vendors, recently issued a spam-related press release which got a lot of attention in the UK press (they have great press contacts!).

To quote John Graham-Cumming’s newsletter on the subject:

1 in 5 British Consumers Buy Software from Spam: that’s according to a survey by the Business Software Alliance. I find that a pretty surprisingly high number and considering it comes from an advocacy group that tries to get people to buy legitimate copies of software I expect it’s not totally accurate. The one thing I find really surprising from the survey are these two statistics: 23% of spam is read by the person receiving it and 22% of people have bought software. Apparently, 11% of people surveyed like the idea of buying through spam because the software is cheaper.

It’s still an interesting figure, but the BSA has come up with some pretty suspect statistics in the past, so pinch of salt applies. As jgc points out, the BSA have a vested interest in making the problem sound worse than it may be in reality.

Still, the survey PDF can be read here, and is worth a look.

Tags: alliance, body, bsa, business, lot, press, release, software, spam, survey

Hmm. The Irish branch of the BSA claims that the percentage of illegal software used in Ireland stood at 42 percent for 2002.

Does that mean 42 percent of all software running in Ireland is a pirate copy? I wonder if anyone ever audits this figures — qui custodiet etc. The article continues:

‘The lack of improvement on Ireland’s piracy rate can be attributed to the proliferation of Internet piracy … and a certain amount of apathy,’ said Julian McMenamin, BSA Ireland chairman. ‘But whatever the excuse, a piracy rate of 42 percent is appalling.’

Is internet piracy really that widespread in the workplace? I can imagine your typical 15-year-old firing up KaZaa or whatever, but is this really likely for your typical Irish IT staffer? I doubt it, to be honest.

And given Ireland’s broadband woes, it’d probably be cheaper to hop in the car, drive to the local Compustore, and buy it over the counter, just to avoid paying those ISDN charges. ;)

Just to contradict the ‘internet piracy’ statement, in this story, McMenamin then states that ‘a particular problem in Ireland was small and medium-sized companies purchasing a licence that is too small, or not upgrading their licence as their companies grow. An offending company might typically have a 10-user licence but allow 50 people to use the software.’

This is a hell of a lot more likely than the ’scary internet’ bugbear, but I would still find it very hard to imagine that this is a uniquely Irish problem that could account for Ireland supposedly having nearly twice the rate of piracy of the UK (42% in Ireland vs. the UK’s 26%).

While taking a look at the BSA site, I note that their automated tool, GASP, now exposes the illegal distribution and storage of copyrighted music, apparently: ‘new features in GASP v6.5 include reports that show a complete listing of MP3 files on audited systems’.

I wonder if my collection of MP3s downloaded from eMusic.com, and ripped from albums I bought, would set off its alarms. Given that the MP3 format has no way to differentiate between pirated and non-pirated music, I would imagine so. False positives a go-go!

Patents: Eamon O’Tuathail’s call for action against software patents. The vote of the Legal Affairs Committee of the EP was yesterday, apparently. Wonder how it went…

Tags: bsa, gasp, internet, licence, percent, piracy, problem, rate, software, wonder