MANILA (02/17/2000) - In its most aggressive initiative against corporate software piracy, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) is seeking an audit of the software being used by more than 10,000 local companies nationwide.

The audit is intended to encourage companies legitimize illegal software being used in their organizations as well as reduce incidence of software piracy, which is estimated at 77 percent.

This latest BSA initiative urges companies to perform an audit of their software assets and submit a Software Declaration Form to the BSA within 90 days starting Feb. 10 and ending in May 10 this year.

"The BSA would like to help companies break their bad software habits," said Huey Tan, vice president of BSA. "The objectives of this campaign are to make it easier for companies to adopt better software management practices and secondly, we want to see a significant reduction in piracy in the corporate sector."

Tan added that although the BSA and the government have been successful against retailers of illegal software, a large number of companies continue to use illegal software despite BSA warnings.

In the two years that the BSA has initiated an education and enforcement campaign, "there has been no impact within the corporate environment," said Tan.

"We're still hearing a lot of companies saying `We're not afraid of you' and based on the feedback of local partners, the government, and the software vendors, no one seems to be legalizing their software," he added.

Lawyer Christopher Lim, a board member of the Intellectual Property Foundation (IPF), said that companies are not required by law to accomplish the declaration form and submit it back to the BSA.

However, companies who don't send back the form are likely to be investigated first by the BSA and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), he said. "(Not sending the form back) might mean the company is saying 'Hey, I'm clean, don't bother me'." There's no problem with that, but we know who the (BSA) will look at first later,'' he said.

Both government and private software associations have already expressed support for the BSA's new program.

Undersecretary Ernesto Ordoez of the Department of Trade and Industry warned that if the country has a reputation of being a haven for software piracy, investors are likely to stay away.

"If we continue to pirate software, investors won't be coming here and we'd be so backward compared to our counterparts in Asia," said Ordoez. "To protect software property rights is to protect our future."

He also urged the NBI, particularly Jose Justo Yap, chief of the NBI's Intellectual Property Rights Task Force, to come up with ways to apprehend not just retailers of illegal software but also end users who use pirated software.

To complement the BSA campaign, software vendors should also take the opportunity to offer discounted software rates to further encourage illegal users of software to legitimize what they are using.

Ordoez called this the "carrot approach" as opposed to the BSA's "stick approach." He urged software companies to come up with a "developing-economy pricing" within two weeks and called on companies to study the different pricing offers after evaluating their software assets which need to be legalized.

Sam Jacoba, business development manager at Microsoft Philippines, agreed with Ordoez and revealed that they already have special pricing schemes.

BSA's Tan said that companies will receive a letter from them detailing a five-step process to determine if they are infringing software property laws.

The first step is for companies to call the BSA Hotline and get a copy of the BSA Software Management Kit. Step two is to review the BSA guide, which highlights legal use of software, appreciation of software as an important company asset, appointing a responsible officer and issuing guidelines to employees against the misuse of company assets.

The third step is the actual audit of the company's computer systems and step four involves filling out the Software Declaration Form and sending it back to the BSA, which is step five.

"Don't wait for the last minute to take action," urged Tan. "Our aim is to help companies understand that computer piracy is a serious issue and it is important to ensure that your computer software is legal." If a company fills in the declaration form and returns it to the BSA, Tan said, they can help that company ensure that it is not at risk from any legal prosecution.

Under the revised Intellectual Property law which took effect in 1998, anyone found to be infringing on software intellectual property rights faces at least three years of imprisonment and a heavy fine.