BSA dubs Manchester second worst for piracy
[Quote:]
It said thousands of firms in the city will be targeted in the group’s latest campaign to clamp down on counterfeit software in Blighty, which it claims costs the economy nearly £1bn a year.
The anti-piracy outfit, which represents the interests of the computer software industry, has already fired off letters to some 5,000 businesses in the Manchester area warning them against punting and using dodgy software. As if last week’s working over by Rangers fans wasn’t enough.
[..]
However, the BSA revealed in February this year, after stuffing letterboxes of Glaswegian businesses with threatening letters in the run-up to Christmas, that the campaign in Scotland hadn’t exactly proved to a be a trailblazing moment for the BSA to chase pesky pirates from its shores.
Only a few hundred firms actually took heed of the warnings and got their software copyright house in order by the deadline, it claimed. The vast majority of companies targeted in that campaign simply ignored the warnings.
That’s undoubtedly an unsettling result for the BSA to stomach. Especially given that the 7,000 or so companies harassed by the group it subsequently pinpointed just 41 unnamed businesses for “flouting” copyright law following the campaign. This seems to suggest that most firms were operating perfectly legit.
I wonder if these letters open with:
“Say, nice company you have there…. shame if something happened to it…”