Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Sony BMG France and Pirated Software

The Silicon Alley Insider has a story yesterday about Sony BMG in France being sued for use of pirated software:

The company is being sued by PointDev, a French software company that makes Windows administration tools, after an IT worker at Sony BMG called and supplied the company with a pirated license number for one of its products.

A subsequent raid of Sony BMG offices in France turned up pirated PointDev software on four servers, and quite a bit more suspect software. The Business Software Alliance thinks that up to 47% of the software installed on French business computers could be pirated. For its part, PointDev is claiming $475,000 in damages. Sony BMG declined to comment.

The CEO of tiny PointDev (six employees), Agustoni Paul-Henry, doesn't think it was an oversight, or the work of one person. "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company," he said.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

what justification could Sony have for pirating software and what is the applicable copyright law in France?

Anonymous said...

Wow! There's a "man bites dog" story if I ever saw one. Sony BMG is unhappy about people pirating their music, yet they are busy pirating software.

Too funny.
Throw the book at the hypocrites!