IT compliance best way to gain an edge over rivals

In recent years, millions of local manufacturing jobs in the United States migrated to countries such as China, Mexico and Vietnam due to their lower operating costs. Use of pirated software, which gives an unfair advantage to those foreign manufacturers over local businesses that pay for licensed information technology, has been seen as an international trade issue concerning distortion of lawful competition rather than a simple copyright violation. It also constitutes a direct threat to the US economy.

At the state and federal levels, US government officials have begun to take action to ensure imports are produced by companies using licensed software. Most of those laws are existing legislation against unfair trade practices while Washington state and Louisiana enacted specific laws to deal with anti-IT theft unfair competition issues last year.

The moves to prevent unfair competition from IT theft has been amplified in recent months through high-profile support in the US House of Representatives, with the House small business committee urging the Federal Trade Commission to find solutions to prevent further job losses due to unfair competition and IT theft.