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The price of Compact Disc Read/Write devices has fallen so sharply that you can now see the impact of increased illegal software activity in wide community areas such as schools, colleges, businesses and backyard operators.

The major premise in "buying" a CD-Write unit is to provide ease-of-backup facilities and archival facilities and this ease of use is not lost on those who wish to "make a quick buck" at the expense of the software industry.

And yet, the backyard operators have swung into full production facilities to provide cheap software that is blatantly copied, illegal and provides a big risk to your organisation when these disks appear iin-house on your systems!

It is estimated by TDK Australia that the total monthly market for blank CD's is 300,000 to 400,000 per month. Some of these blanks end up as illegal copies of software and bootleg music/video clips.

The following list of titles (illegally copied software) came from a SINGLE CD-ROM!
 

Basically the story is that you ask for what you want and it comes on a CD for $25 to $30.
Its as easy as that! All you have to do is ask one of the underground merchants, they'll tell you how to get the latest games, pictures, software etc. With the release of Windows 98 pirated copies of CD's  will be available within 24 hours (or less) of release on the world market.

“BUYING” All THE ABOVE TITLES on a SINGLE CD for a cost of $ AUD 12 either direct from HONG KONG or at "local car boot sales. markets, swap-meets in Australia etc. for around $25 top $30" is now occurring on a daily basis, particularly at weekends. Some places blatantly advertise to "back-up your hard drive" in local papers in the computer columns and this becomes a source of pirated software as well.

Remember, that most of these CD's will allow you to install the above software on EVERY machine that has a CD ROM attached using your own organisation name and staff name, so it will look like it is legal. The penalties for doing this are substantial!

Which means you can load around 500MB to 600MB of ILLEGAL SOFTWARE for between $ 12 to $30 to each system that has a CD-ROM device!!!!!

And, you should be aware that you can catch viruses from a CD-ROM disc, and not be able to fix the CD-ROM disc with your anti-virus software checker as the virus remains there permanently, causing continual re-infection!

Finally, some of the software copied onto these disks may not be "complete" and can create havoc with different versions of DLL's etc overwriting key dll files on your live system. This adds to your "cost-of-ownership" excercise and creates help desk management problems!

A bigger problem is the ability to copy software directly from your organisation's own legally acquired software and then "filter" this out into the market for re-sale. There has been an increasing ability for this to occur as there are no major controls or check-points on areas in an organisation to monitor this activity. You could be held liable in these circumstances as your name and serial number details are recorded on the software copied.

Steps you could take to control this illegal activity are;

• to make it essential to restrict the installation and access to CD-Write units
• to make it essential to monitor and control the purchase of blank disks
• make it essential to monitor and control what is copied to the blank CD's
• create an accountable register to track CD's written "in-house"
• create a CD electronic tracking or register system which physically identifies these assets in use in an organisation and who is responsible for the security of those assets

Ask for your SOFTWARE AUDIT TOOLKIT,  to  check your systems to find out  whether your staff  have “acquired” copies of illegal software, and installed them on your systems!