Compliance Remains a Concern Even in the Cloud

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
For many businesses, the allure of moving their software platforms, applications and/or databases to The Cloud lies substantially in the promise of ridding themselves of license-compliance concerns. The pitfalls of a Cloud-based architecture are worth accepting for ma......

Licensing Oracle Software in a Third Party’s Cloud

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
Many companies would like to know whether and to what extent their existing Oracle software product licenses entitle them to use that software in a third-party cloud-hosting environment – such as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment – ......

Burden of Proof in Copyright Infringement Matters

Keli Johnson Swan  Comments (0)
In a civil copyright infringement claim, many users of copyrighted material are surprised to learn that once the copyright owner has demonstrated that it owns a copyright in the work, the burden shifts to the copyright user to demonstrate that it had the right to use the......

Autodesk Licensing Implications of Working from Home

Keli Johnson Swan  Comments (0)
The Covid-19 pandemic shifted entire non-essential industries to a remote workforce, leaving companies scrambling to set up employees to work from home. A study in June 2020 by Pricewaterhouse Coopers determined that nearly 70% of office workers were working remotely. Wh......

How to Contend with Oracle’s Many Licensing Policies

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
It is common practice for software publishers to incorporate by reference various licensing rules and policies to govern the usage of the publishers’ software products. For example, Microsoft’s volume license agreements (such as MPSAs or Enterprise Agreements) incorp......

Key Components of Software Audit Response Policies

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
Software audits are significant legal and financial risks for all companies. With more and more software publishers utilizing intrusive audits and other information-gathering exercises as the basis for licensing transactions and – more troublingly – as sources of rev......

How to Conduct a Software Audit

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
[caption id="attachment_5534" align="alignnone" width="614"] Fundamentals of Software Audit Data Collection[/caption]   One of the tasks with which Scott & Scott’s clients most commonly request our assistance is how to conduct a software audit. While almost ......

Oracle Audit Risks

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
Oracle maintains what I consider to be the most aggressive audit program of any major software publisher. Its licensing rules can be extremely difficult to understand, and they frequently are not clearly stated in the applicable license agreements. Moreover, Oracle’s L......

Are Mandatory Software Inventory Tools on the Horizon?

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
Software licensing compliance is a complex task to manage. The metrics for measuring compliance often are a challenge to gather, and those metrics typically are different from software publisher to software publisher. This means that software asset management (SAM) teams nee......

Microsoft Clarifies Rules Related to Self-Hosting

Christopher Barnett  Comments (0)
I previously presented my thoughts here regarding changes Microsoft made to its Product Terms pertaining to the Self-Hosted Applications benefit under Software Assurance. After publishing that entry, Microsoft reached out to me to clarify that the principal effect of the ch......

Beware “Document Soup” Software Licensing

Julie Machal-Fulks  Comments (0)
On July 22, 2010, software publisher AccuSoft sued Northrop Grumman Systems in federal court for breach of contract, copyright infringement and trademark infringement related to Northrop’s use of AccuSoft’s ImageGear and ImageTransport software. Northrop allegedly used a......