For those of you interested in the legal aspects of license compliance and software audits, here’s an interesting development that took place in the D.C. Court of Appeals just a few weeks ago:  After an anonymous employee filed a bogus piracy claim with the SIIA against his/her company, Solers Inc, the firm filed a defamation lawsuit against the “John Doe” informant and tried to subpoena the SIIA to reveal the defendant’s identity. Unfortunately for Solers (and fortunately for the defendant), the Court of Appeals ruled that because Solers couldn’t provide sufficient evidence that it had suffered economic or other losses as a result of the false accusation, the subpoena would be quashed and the case dismissed.

Although the ruling doesn’t apply to areas outside the District of Columbia, it still potentially serves as a precedent both to businesses and would-be whistle-blowers. First, businesses may be more or less inclined to pursue the identity of a John Doe depending on their ability to furnish evidence of economic damages, and the perceived strength of such “proof.” Perhaps more interestingly, employees considering filing a confidential license infringement claim to the BSA or SIIA may think again if they know that under certain circumstances, particularly when economic harm results, their anonymity may not be protected in the event of a subpoena.

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Warning to readers: this blog post, while inspired by a true story of a license agreement gone awry, is not really about license agreements.  Rather, it’s a reflection on what an impressive living those attorneys in the business of writing legal contracts must make. While I don’t necessarily think there’s a global conspiracy, it’s no joke when they say that lawyers craft language in such a way as to guarantee their own job security.  It takes a lawyer not only to draw up a license agreement in the first place, but another lawyer to interpret the agreement for the signing entity, and yet more lawyers to testify for, litigate against or defend parties who obviously didn’t hire the best lawyers to perform the previous two duties. 

If I’d been aware of this brilliant ponzi-like scheme back in my early twenties, heck, I might have applied to law school to learn the fine art of “legalese” (lawyer-invented jargon that leads the average person to question their own intelligence or assume the caffeine hasn’t yet kicked in from their morning coffee).  I mean, did someone really get paid to come up with this gem?:

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An article caught my eye this morning in Manufacturing Business Daily summarizing the results of a recent Ernst & Young survey that focused on software asset management philosophies and practices among software vendors and their customers.  

Before discussing the results, I should point out that I’m pretty skeptical about studies conducted and published by firms with a commercial interest in the topic being explored.  Because Ernst & Young dedicates part of its business to IT governance, internal auditing, and compliance services for large enterprises, it’s virtually impossible for the firm to be objective in its research methodology or interpretation of results–in fact, they offered no information about their approach to the survey.  (For example, is there inherent bias among those selected to participate?  What were the roles with respect to compliance of those individuals or teams that actually completed the survey?  Why did they recruit end-user organizations that averaged over 10,000 desktops [organizations of this size comprise only 0.1 percent of all US companies over 100 employees]?  Is it possible to draw conclusions relevant to the marketplace with so few participants?  The list goes on and on.)

Nevertheless, the results are interesting and at least on the surface validate what we’ve long suspected to be the true motives behind vendor audits; software publishers are far more interested in revenue generation than they are in protecting their intellectual property or helping customers be successful in managing their software estates.  Only four of the eight “major” software publishers surveyed stated that protection of intellectual property rights is an objective of their compliance programs, flying directly in the face of the very legal platform software vendors and the BSA claim as the basis of their actions.  It’s also ironic that only 38% of vendors suggested that their compliance programs, which are generally advertised as “SAM” programs, have customer education and/or process improvement as a stated goal. 

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When asked about our company’s products, most people immediately think of Express Software Manager^®, our flagship product offered to businesses for IT asset inventory, software usage, and license reporting.  What many (including our long-standing customers) don’t realize is that we also separately license our software catalog, one of the key components of Express Software Manager, to a very different “customer”—asset management vendors themselves. 

Today we are proud to add Numara Software to a growing list of OEM partners, which includes IBM, LANDesk, New Boundary, BMC, and Amando Software.   The Express Software Identification Database (ESID)^® will power the software recognition for Numara’s Asset Management Platform, strengthening the accuracy and reliability of its existing capabilities such as asset inventory, software deployment, patch management, and license tracking.  Read the press release here.

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Happy New Year from all of us at Express Metrix!  We hope you had a terrific holiday. 

As I think about our blogging efforts in 2011, I’d like to address some of the suggestions we’ve received from customers to incorporate more product-centric content into our posts.  To that end, I’m happy to introduce a new blog series which will feature a different report found within Express Software Manager each month.  My hope is that it will be useful for our customers, both current and prospective, in extracting as much value as possible from the product to assist with their IT asset management efforts. 

So let’s dive right in.  We’ll start with one of our most critical reports relating to license compliance, entitled  “Am I Compliant”. 

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