Through its campaign BSA aims to decrease the damages, resulting of software piracy and affecting the whole society.
BSA's Soft Visit campaign continues with a new momentum. During the program BSA visited several hundreds small and medium sized Hungarian companies so far. The organisation launched the campaign exactly one year ago and collected valuable information on the software use patterns of small to midsize companies. During the visits the organisation’s experts asked questions about the software management practices of the selected companies, gave valuable information on the risks of illegal software use to the managers, and in case of software management deficiencies provided expert advice on improvement. Several hundred visits, managerial interviews, and analysing nearly 3,000 software inventory led to some interesting findings. The experiences collected during the visits clearly show the large majority of the management of SMEs are not aware of the current Hungarian laws regulating legal software use, did not implement internal company processes avoiding illegal practices of employees, and although 40% of them keep records of their licensed software, only 0.5% of the reviewed 2,800 software inventories met international standards. The better managed and more successful a company is, the better they handle software management issues as well. These are the same companies that support the most BSA's efforts to make decisive steps against companies with illegal software usage. The next wave of the BSA visits will focus on the software use practices of companies who did not answer yet to previous BSA contacts, thus making the survey complete to the originally targeted group. The visits will be extended to the total area of the country. BSA expects to decrease the damages resulting of software piracy and affecting the whole society. In Hungary the 42% piracy rate causes 106 million dollar loss for the software industry every year*, while as a 10% reduction could yield 720m dollars additional economic growth. This piracy reduction may result 480 million dollars additional revenue for the local economy, a further 145 million dollar tax revenue for the state, and may create 2,500 additional jobs.** *Third annual BSA and IDC global Piracy Study, May 2006 ** IDC Economic Impact Study, Dec. 2005