FAST threatens companies with demands for compensation over 'historic' unlicensed software

Federation Against Software Theft to impose retrospective penalties on corporate software pirates

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) is threatening to demand more money from companies that it finds infringing the terms of their software licences.

The not-for-profit organisation has announced plans to pursue compensation from companies for what it calls "historic illegal [software] use".

The organisation, no doubt partly driven by the rise of cloud computing, claims that it has historically focused on education, but now warns that it's going to get tough.

The audits it has conducted, it claims, have focused more on 'accidental' licence misuse, but FAST claims that, while software piracy is declining, a hard core of companies are egregiously flouting the law.

"In recent years there has been a very clear move by the global software industry to take a new approach to address the growing issue of unintentional piracy as a result of unpaid licences in business," said Alex Hilton, CEO of FAST.

He added: "But as we have seen there is still a huge number of determined individuals trying to avoid the costs of correctly licensed software. As a result, we have announced that FAST will no longer act to just recoup the losses suffered by our members, but we will also recover money for historic illegal use.

"That means we will no longer be going after infringers solely for the cost of new software licences, we will now be acting retrospectively and that means a far greater financial impact.

"We've heard of examples where junior IT staff are forced to mislead vendors or auditors only to later become the whistleblowers. This is nothing short of a fraudulent management mindset and we are determined to stamp out intentional software misuse."

Julian Heathcote Hobbins, FAST's general counsel, promised to deploy the organisation's "traditional tools, such as civil lawsuits" in order to clamp down harder on the corporate software pirates, as well as passing the details to national law enforcement agencies to consider for criminal prosecution.

FAST claimed in a recent report that the commercial value of unlicensed software in the UK is the second highest in Europe, with a piracy rate of 22 per cent.

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