14 DAY TRIAL // When I first got a hold of this piece of news, I was astonished. The words "international firm" and "pirateware" just couldn't be related in my mind, but it seems that no matter how successful a company may be, some people will resort to piracy, for reasons I cannot comprehend. The organization will not be identified, for legal reasons.
They had, what the Register called "significant shortfalls in software licenses" and you know what that means. You download some cracked software and then you get and get the serial number from the web. You don't even have to be a hacker for this, you just Google search the program and the term "serial number" and you're bound to get a list of forums from which you can get these CD-keys. Of course, this is not recommended to do, since it's highly illegal. The firm was fined $3.46 million and that may seem huge, but they were using pirated versions of products from Adobe, Autodesk, Avid and Microsoft. I wonder if they had a cracked version of Windows too?
In any case, it's understandable when individual users get cracks from the web, because they cannot afford to buy the original software, understandable, but not legal. But when we're talking about a firm that can afford to pay such a huge fine, how can they use illegal software? How could they even think about it? I don't know!
The Business Software Alliance, BSA for short, which had made the criminal complaint in the first place, took the opportunity to state that if software had been better managed, things would have never gotten so far. Software needs to be licensed, in order to avoid any legal consequences. It doesn't matter who you are, or what business you run, software has to be paid for. And I think that the main problem here is that people don't really see piracy as a crime. Real life thieves are way smaller in numbers than cyber-crooks are, as more and more people use pirateware these days.