Combating piracy - the 'open value' way

With an aim to ease the pressure on consumer while buying costly software, global software major Microsoft has introduced a deferred licensing program 'Open Value' covering all its products for small and mid-market customers. 

This program is also likely to provide a much-needed boost in order to thwart software piracy activity within the Indian region as well. This licensing program enables a customer to pay for any Microsoft product they purchase over a period of three years. 

"India is a big market for us and we want to make it easier for our consumers to purchase software. This is a significant change in our license policy in this region to make our software affordable and accessible. The licensing will cover small and mid-market products and hence it will help us to counter piracy," said, Neelam
Dhavan, MD, Microsoft India. 

According to industry estimates, more than 73% of Microsoft's software deployed in India is pirated, so introducing liberal licensing policies such as this would certainly push people buy the original copies of software. "This licensing program is our way to make buying of software an easy experience for our customers in the small and mid-market segments. Through this licensing program we are trying to reduce the piracy levels and encourage the consumers as well as the reseller community to go for the original versions," informed, Rajeev
Mittal, Group Director, Small and Medium Solutions and Partners, Microsoft. 

Piracy won't pay much, this is the message being given my Microsoft, as the company has recently engaged itself in an aggressive manner to counter high rates of piracy within the reseller community itself. The company has taken notice of many resellers in cities like New Delhi and even Chandigarh for allegedly engaging in unauthorized hard disk loading of software onto computers. 

As prevalent in many parts of country there are many resellers and VARs that have been engaged in uploading unlicensed software onto hard drives, and/or sold counterfeit software without providing each individual customer with the proper license, media, or accompanying manual or documentation.

According to market sources close to Chandigarh channel community, as many as eight resellers have been issued fine of upto Rs 1 lakh after pirated Microsoft software was found. With Microsoft finetuning its agressiveness to combat piracy - organisations like BSA and Nasscomm are confidant of curbing piracy rates in India. 

According to the reseller community, Microsoft does inform the suspected software pirates to cease software piracy and issue various notifications from time to time. "They usually do this. They have the databses so they know whom to contact and how to do it. Before these kind of operations, each suspected VAR was issued a letter notifying them that they were under suspicion and that they should not indulse in software piracy. I sincerely feel that this should give a much needed boost to the anti-piracy campaign within this country," informed, a Chandigarh based reseller on conditions of
anonimity. 

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