A Melbourne engineering company has been penalised $150,000 by Business Software Alliance (BSA) for alleged use of software products from Autodesk, Adobe and Microsoft without license.

The settlement makes this the second largest case damages bill ever for BSA in Australia, and the biggest in nearly five years.

Beyond paying the damages sum, the company must now also purchase the required software licenses to get legal.  The company must also implement proper software asset management (SAM) procedures to prevent future incidents of software copyright infringement.

The case was reported via the BSA website in October 2010 by a former company employee.  While BSA Australia typically offers a maximum reward of $5,000 for information that leads to successful action against a business using unauthorised software, the informant of this particular case will receive a reward of $20,000 for providing the lead, in line with a BSA Australia incentive program which ran during September and October of last year.

BSA Australia Co-Chair, Clayton Noble said, “This significant case serves as a reminder to Australian businesses of the importance of using properly licensed software. Some businesses think they can save a few bucks by installing pirated software rather than licensing it.  But they risk loss of data and network downtime if their pirated software is non-genuine or doesn’t receive important security updates.  And if they’re caught, those businesses also face a substantial damages bill on top of the need to purchase proper licenses. Business software piracy is false economy.”