p2pnet.net News:- The BSA (Business Software Alliance) industry group is highly chuffed.

Owned by some of the fattest companies in the world and with a heavy intererest in all things Hollywood, it’s persuaded the US congress to cough up $10 million “to continue the Justice Department’s fight to end the theft of intellectual property”.

In other words, US taxpayers will be forking out $10 mil to protect certain corporate bottom lines.

Losses to the software industry are measured in both “hard dollars and an intangible stifling of innovation due to loss of copyright protections,” says president and ceo Robert Holleyman.

Significantly, the organization singled out famed Hollywood supporters James Sensenbrenner (house judiciary committee chairman ), ranking member John Conyers, Lamar Smith and Howard Berman for special mention, thanking them for their “advocacy and support”.

“BSA also urges Senate leaders to ensure that similar funding be included in the Senate version of the Justice Department appropriations bill for their support of this legislation.”

Fascinating the way the organization refers to itself as ‘BSA’. Is that like America, or perhaps Canada or Germany, do you think – a nation? Certainly, the way it addresses the US administration and regularly hectors sovereign nations suggests that’s how it thinks of itself.

It even has its own spy agency with Holleyman as Spook in Chief.

BSA”s ”World Wide’ members are: Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Bentley Systems, Borland, Internet Security Systems, Macromedia, NC Software/Mastercam, Microsoft, Network Associates, SolidWorks, Sybase, Symantec, UGS PLM Solutions, VERITAS Software.

‘Policy’ members are Cisco Systems, Entrust, HP, IBM, Intel, Intuit, RSA Security.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 10th, 2004 at 2:32 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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