Stories about: BSA

Should European governments favor open-source software when they hold tenders for public contracts? Economists and policy makers appear to think so but industry giants including Microsoft argue that this would be discriminatory and are considering legal action to prevent this from happening.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

Scouts honor, the 98-year-old Boy Scouts of America (BSA) organization is adopting open source software as a path to building better software that supports the almost 3 million scouts and 1.1 million adults who make up the group.

A 31-year-old Pennsylvania man who allegedly ran a home-based online business selling pirated copies of software, music and movies was arrested Friday following an undercover operation by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Business Software Alliance (BSA) trade groups.

A U.S. judge has sentenced the owner of a Web site selling pirated software to six years in prison and ordered him to pay more than US$4.1 million in restitution, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said Friday.

Software publishers and Socialist Party members are among the groups unhappy with the new French copyright law that took effect Friday. French Net surfers could now go to prison for downloading copyright music files without authorization, while companies such as Apple Computer, which make or use DRM (digital rights management) technology to protect music downloads, may have to provide details of the system to their competitors in the interests of interoperability.

The "near automatic" injunctions that judges issue when a company is found to be infringing a patent hurt innovation, tech organizations are arguing as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear a high-profile patent case.

Opponents of attempts to allow software to be patented in the European Union warned Monday that new consultations on an E.U.-wide general patent could be used to reintroduce software patents through the back door.

The European Parliament's legal affairs committee has voted in favor of proposed legislation to harmonize the rules for awarding patents across the 25-member European bloc, a result seen by some as favorable to big IT vendors.

Open-source leaders have called for a boycott of standards from the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), in response to a new OASIS policy on the use of patents in its standards.

Reducing software piracy by just 10 percentage points worldwide would generate 1.5 million jobs and add US$400 billion to the world economy, according to a study released Wednesday by the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and IDC.