Is your software legal?

The Government has given Trading Standards the power and duty to enforce copyright laws on businesses' software, and a pilot has started in Cardiff where TS can enter business premises and check the licences of all software being used.

Whilst the majority of businesses will be unaffected by this type of law, there are bound to be some who are unknowingly or unwittingly breaking the law using downloaded copies, borrowed versions of software etc. The pilot in Cardiff may lead the way to a national scheme, so FAST have produced information to help businesses ensure that all the software they are using is correctly licensed.

Whether this is a good spend of £5million to protect software companies rights, rather than protecting consumers and businesses from dodgy software can only be debated, but at least the program is designed to prosecute only when software copyright infringement is deemed to have been done intentionally.