Piracy Whistleblowers Paid $57K In 2010 141
alphadogg writes "In 2010, the Software and Information Industry Association received 157 reports of alleged corporate end user software piracy. Of the 157 reports, 42 (or 27%) were judged sufficiently reliable to pursue. Of these, 16 qualified for rewards totaling $57,500. The profile of sources reporting software piracy indicates that most reports come from former IT staff – these are the people who typically witness the illegal use of software. 75% of all reports come from IT staff or managers, 11% from the company's senior management and 4% from outside consultants. More than 59% of those reporting are no longer employed by the target company. In fact, many of SIIA's sources report that their primary reason for leaving the target company was the company's lack of ethical behavior related to software compliance."
Re:FTW! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes.
Companies that engage in the unethical behavior, or encourage their employees to be complicit without concern shouldn't be surprised when that behavior is taken against employees results in revenge via the money factor.
Of all the companies I've worked for, the largest ones kept a relative control on software piracy, however not everyone engages in ethical actions.
For example a call center outsourcer, the management tried to steal software written by an employee, and when the employee refused, he quit and threatened to sue them. The thing is I had the source code to it, and the company then tried to pull that on me, but then one day they decided to delete it, and all code, pieces and to know who has copies of it.
In the case with (largest auction company) I wrote something from scratch, and they didn't try to seize the software at all. Quite the opposite, I was let go without anyone asking for the source code. So my guess is that the software was abandoned. The company does admit to taking ownership of other employees (those not working in a coding responsibility) software, and the employment contact grants license to anything invented while employed.
Both companies made extensive use of Citrix servers and virtually unlimited copies of MS Office, Seibel (as CRM,) and in-house written tools (some by actual programmers, and some by customer support reps.)
But I can tell you with absolute certainty that past a certain point, large companies don't keep track of individual licenses, they just buy bulk site licenses (not physical copies) and some IT staff ignore the license (much like everyone ignores license agreements) and are only aware of software that they can audit. This results devices like laptops not being accounted, and when staff are fired/quit they don't "return the license." So in some cases the IT staff actually are over-purchasing licenses for software just so they don't have to deal with the BSA.