Aussie plastic maker forced to pay $50k for software theft

Software vendor Autodesk scored a victory in the battle against copyright infringement this month, settling with a Melbourne-based plastic and technology manufacturing company over unlicensed use of its AutoCAD software.

Acting on behalf of its member Autodesk, the Australian arm of the Business Software Alliance pursued a case against Alternative Plastics for its unlicensed use of Autodesk’s software.

Alternative Plastics was forced to hand over $50,000 to the BSA as well as compensate Autodesk for the copies of the software it had been using without a license. 

The company had been using Autodesk AutoCAD LT, Autodesk Inventor and Autodesk AutoCAD Mechanical software without licenses. Only a handful of licenses were held, with more than a dozen used without.

BSA Australia chair Clayton Noble told CRN the alliance had approached the company prior to taking the matter to the court in April, but found it was unwilling to participate. Noble said once the threat of legal action loomed, Alternative Plastics was more cooperative. 

“Our best effort is to try and settle the case out of court. If they come back to us and say they aren’t licensed, we work with them on settling the matter quickly and efficiently and try to avoid going to court. In this case they would not respond to efforts to settle,” he said.

“Sometimes businesses stick their heads in the sand and hope it will go away, but we don’t let it drop if they don’t respond. In this case we commenced proceedings in the Federal Magistrates court, and then they came to us and achieved a settlement.”

Inside information

Autodesk and the BSA were notified of the infringement by a former employee who was willing to testify against the company. Alternative Plastics was given the opportunity to prove its use of the software was licensed but declined to take it up, Noble said. 

The BSA in the UK offers financial incentives for whistleblowers to come forward, and has been criticised in the past for the practice amid claims it could constitute a breach of the UK Bribery Act.

The anti-piracy body offers rewards of up to £10,000 ($A15,549) for information that leads to the discovery of pirated software or licence misuse.

BSA confirmed it offers up to $A5000 for information that leads to a successful action against a business entity using unauthorised software in Australia, subject to terms and conditions. 

It declined to comment on whether financial compensation had been offered to the Alternative Plastic informant, citing confidentiality. 

Noble said the BSA and Autodesk had been fortunate in this circumstance with hard evidence and an employee willing to swear in an affadavit, but not all cases were so successful. He said the BSA currently had 30 active cases on its books. 

“We receive over 100 reports of unlicensed software use a year, and last year we settled financially for around 12 cases,” he said.

“It is very difficult in some circumstances because a lot of the case law on this says copyright infringement in this type is easy to do and hard to prove, because it all goes on in the walls of the business concerned.”

In Australia, the BSA counts over 30 members on its books, including the likes of Apple, Symantec, Microsoft, McAfee, Intel, Cisco and Adobe. Its remit is to promote a long-term legislative and legal environment for the software industry. 

According to the BSA’s Global Software Piracy Study, the commercial value of pirated software in Australia hit $US763 million ($A731 million) for new unlicensed software installations in 2011, compared to $US658 million in 2010.