Software copying is a crime: BSA
Report by Naveed Baqir (Islamabad)

KARACHI, March 1, 2001: Business Software Alliance (BSA), the representative of world's leading software companies, has warned that copying of computer programmes without the publisher's permission is a crime  punishable by civil and criminal proceedings. Acting on BSA's complaint in Karachi, the police have arrested three  hard disk loaders in the jurisdiction of police stations Gulshan-e-Iqbal and  Ferozabad for violating the copyright law, a BSA spokesman has alerted  in a  statement issued here. All the eight computers and 195 illegal CDs were confiscated and cases  were registered against the shop owners as a part of BSA's nationwide drive against software pirates, he added. "Many people either do not know that copying software is illegal or simply choose to ignore it," he noted and said whether a person innocently or purposefully engages in software piracy, it shows disrespect to the intellectual property rights.The spokesman said that software piracy creates many victims. "The information technology industry, governments, independent developers and labour all have to pay a big price for software piracy through lost jobs  and decreased revenues."Computer programmes, which often require thousands of hours to  develop are copied in minutes and distributed without compensation to the developers, he said and added, BSA estimates that the software industry lost  $12 billion globally to piracy in the year 1999 against $11 billion in   1998. The figure may inflate further if legal action was not taken against the pirates, the spokesman said. Since 1988, the BSA has been the voice of the world's leading software developers before governments and with consumers in the international marketplace. Its members include Adobe, Attachmate, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Corel, Lotus Development, Macromedia, Microsoft, Network Associates, Novell, Symantec and Visio.

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