Tag Archives: «software licensing»

Software publishers, acting alone, or through a proxy such as the Business Software Alliance (“BSA”) or Software & Information Industry Association (“SIIA”), regularly audit customers or potential customers to ensure license compliance and deter against copyr......

Microsoft’s Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) is the principal licensing agreement for companies that want to use Microsoft products to deliver hosted software solutions over the Internet. Microsoft’s standard volume license agreements expressly prohibit usi......

Many software-solution vendors utilize third-party infrastructure or application programs as frameworks for embedded solutions that they sell to their customers and install on their customers’ computers. Licenses for those third-party products typically can be acquired......

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......

In order to effectively manage their software usage and to mitigate compliance exposure, companies need to know how to gather and analyze information regarding their product usage. While some software products may have unique data-collection requirements that ordinarily ......

In order to effectively manage their software usage and to mitigate compliance exposure, companies need to know how to gather and analyze information regarding their product usage. While some software products may have unique data-collection requirements that ordinarily ......

In our experience, many companies facing software-licensing audits initiated by vendors like Microsoft, Oracle or IBM seem to be under the impression that auditors have a nearly unfettered right to information. This is not the case. However, too many audit targets discover t......

It is not unusual for companies to use virtualization technologies to reduce costs, ensure redundancy, and reduce physical size of the network. Some of these companies are turning to VMware to manage their virtualized environments. Virtualization can involve complex tech......

The end of the year is a busy time for software publishers and entities like the BSA | The Software Alliance (“BSA”) and the Software & Industry Information Association (“SIIA”) to resolve an audit target’s copyright infringement dispute by entering into se......

A software audit may come in many forms, ranging from an offer for a free Software Asset Management (SAM), a License Verification, or a request by a representative organization, such as an outside law firm, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) or Software & Informati......

Companies are sometimes fielding multiple software audit demands from multiple software vendors simultaneously, which can significantly impact in-house counsel. Software audits may be initiated by publishers or through outside entities such as BSA | The Software Allia......

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 – ......

Most software license agreements used by major publishers like Microsoft and IBM are in many ways vague with respect to license restrictions and metrics. This leaves licensees in the position of having to interpret the agreements based on whatever guidance may be availab......

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......

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......

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......

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......

[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 ......

In the recent years, companies have slowly been incorporating more options for its employees to work remotely from home or elsewhere.  However, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this transition and forced entire companies to work from home without time to prepare the pr......

Companies with experience licensing Microsoft software and services through Enterprise Agreements know that small forests could be felled to produce the paper required for the typical document stack. EAs often incorporate a dozen or more different components, including som......

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......

Microsoft and Flexera recently announced a joint initiative that the two companies have touted as a way to transform “the software supply chain” through the use of a standard set of software asset management (SAM) solutions. By deploying Flexera’s FlexNetManager Suite ......

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......

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......

Independent software vendors (ISVs) constitute a diverse group of businesses whose core business model typically consists of utilizing third-party software infrastructure and development platforms (such as Microsoft SQL Server or IBM WebSphere Application Server) to create t......

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......