Little interest shown in amnesty campaign
Less than 1 per cent of 30,000 companies approached to certify that they were using legal business software bothered to respond, according to a pirated-software watchdog.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) and the government's Intellectual Property Department (IPD) began contacting companies last October as part of a six-month amnesty on civil prosecutions for owning unlicensed or pirated software.
Only 160 companies, or 0.53 per cent, responded to the direct mail or telephone approaches. It was found that, on average, more than a quarter of the software owned by 38 of those firms was not legal.
Under the amnesty, their details would not have been passed to the Customs and Excise Department or to software manufacturers, an IPD spokeswoman said.
The BSA's Asian director of anti-piracy, Tarun Sawney, said: 'The programme was of a pilot nature and we are encouraged by the positive response of the business community.'
The six-month campaign, which included the amnesty and certification programme, was a bid to encourage small- and medium-sized enterprises with fewer than 100 employees to volunteer for audits of their computer systems to establish if they had unlicensed software.