[ Thanks to Francesco Marchetti-Stasi
for this report: ]
Ten days after
the [claim] of a private
citizen accusing them of untrustworthy advertising, BSA issued a press release. They claim
they are not guilty, and that the ad was well-meant.
The press release, of course, is in Italian. Here’s the
translation.
Milan, November 8, 2000
–
Business Software
Alliance, the non-profit international organisation representing
some of the major software houses, rejects the accusation that
their advertising campaign may be untruthful, and claim instead
that it is correct and important to convince firms to check the law
compliance of their software.
The accusation shows that the problem of software piracy is
still largely underestimated and difficult to fight, since a normal
ad, necessarily expressed in terms meant to be comprehensible to
everybody, was interpreted in a contorted way, to block the
campaign itself.
The choice of the ad made by BSA was based on the alarming
reports on the violation in Italy of software copyright made by
International Planning Research: this data shows that 44% of the
software present on the market is not original. This phenomenon
appears to be much widespread also in the Italian firms, due to the
small perception of its seriousness by the public.
In this scenario the recent law n. 248/2000, which modified the
previous law on copyright by giving better protection to copyright
holders, clarified that the unauthorised duplication made for
profit and the holding of software for commercial purpose [sic…]
is a crime punishable with jail from 6 months to 3 years and with a
fine from 5 to 30 millions lire [from 2’000 to 13’000 $].
Therefore BSA set as its goal the spreading of the important
message coming from the new law, with the aim to raise the
knowledge of the phenomenon and stimulate the public to get more
information on software protection by the law.
Still no news from AGCM;
apparently their reaction time is much longer than BSA’s itself.
Let’s hope at least they’ll find BSA’s advertising guilty.