Criticism
The BSA's enforcement practices against small to medium sized businesses have been the subject of numerous articles. About 2006, the BSA came under fire for offering reward money up to $200,000 USD to disgruntled employees that report current or former employers for alleged violations of BSA member software licenses.
According to an article in Mother Jones magazine, the BSA discovered in 1995 that Antel, the Uruguayan national telephone company, had pirated $100,000 worth of Microsoft, Novell, and Symantec software. The BSA's lawyers in Uruguay quickly filed suit, but dropped the suit in 1997 when Antel signed a "special agreement" with Microsoft to replace all of its software with Microsoft products. This has led to accusations that the BSA is a front for Microsoft, with its other members being enlisted purely to disguise Microsoft's dominant role.
The BSA supported the highly controversial US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). This has led to calls from various online communities that BSA members should be boycotted as a result of their perceived attack on the Internet's underlying structure. Kaspersky Lab has left the BSA over this.
Read more about this topic: Business Software Alliance
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)