Kodit
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Business
Software Licensing
Managing the Unseen
Software, albeit often invisible, is covered by the laws of copyright and using software outside the terms of its licence can constitute either a civil and/or a criminal breach of copyright law. It is therefore of utmost importance for all organisations to understand their liabilities and how supplying a user with a computer in order to help them complete tasks, can have extremely serious consequences if that user is not correctly trained, or is not made aware of the consequences of simple everyday actions.
Liability
The officers of a company are responsible for ensuring that their organisation complies with the law. Ignorance is no defence. Even if a manager is totally unaware that illegal use of software is occurring within his or her organisation that does not absolve the company from legal proceedings.
An employer is vicariously liable for the wrongful acts committed by employees in the course of employment. This covers acts of the type the employee was employed to carry out during employment, even if the method used was forbidden. This gains momentum where an offence has been committed by an organisation and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of a director, manager, secretary or other similar officer of the organisation, or a person purporting to act in any such capacity. In these cases he as well as the organisation is guilty of the offence and liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.
This means that if an organisation has given an employee certain tools with which to complete their daily tasks (i.e. a computer), and does not take adequate steps to correctly train and control the employee’s use of the tools, then an officer of the organisation is liable, along with the organisation.
Software Compliance – Risk Management
The cost of non compliance is a major concern, yet the implications of getting software licensing wrong – or ignoring it altogether – extend not just to your bottom line, but to your corporate governance, network security and the performance of business-critical applications.
For many organisations managing software licensing is not only difficult to achieve without the relevant legal knowledge, but is costly and time consuming to carry out in practice. Kodit can minimise the disruption and cost involved by conducting a detailed review and appraisal of the organisations requirements and draw up an appropriate software licensing strategy accordingly. During the review our expert consultants will use our ‘RADIO’ methodology to take into account your current and likely future regulatory compliance obligations, your legal obligations, and any other objectives and outcomes you would like to achieve from your Software Licensing practice.
Kodit will help you to understand your software licence agreements so that you avoid overspending on software licensing, and negate the risk of running unlicensed software.
Consult the Experts
All of our consultants have many years experience of Software License Management, and are fully conversant with the requirements of the leading standards in Software Licensing; FAST software compliance programme and ISO 19770 (The international standard for Software Asset Management Processes). All of our solutions will meet the guidelines set out in these standards, and we would be happy to take your organisation through the process of certification to either of these standards. By the end of which your organisation will be enabled to;
- increase awareness of the importance of standardised IT (environment and processes)
- improve their IT environment and purchase volume control
- enhance internal processes for monitoring and administrating installed software and licences
- strengthen software forecasting and budgeting
- minimise over-licensing and remove under-licensing
- guard against prosecutions, lawsuits and fines
- prepare software inventories in advance of potential mergers, de-mergers or acquisitions.