Autodesk raid consultancy firm, recovers Rs 80 lakh

BANGALORE: Autodesk Inc. conducted a raid on a company offering a wide range

of consultancy services ranging from civil and structural to architectural and

mechanical engineering with offices throughout India. The exercise involved

raiding of six offices of the company, in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and

Bangalore, simultaneously. Further to an order of the Mumbai High Court, illegal

copies of AutoCAD worth Rs 80 lakh were seized by the court receivers in

enforcing the court order.

As a result of the seizure, the company's ongoing work on computers found

with the illegal software has been stalled. The company may also face payment of

damages and legal fees, besides legalizing their software, and facing negative

publicity.

Over the last nine months, Autodesk has been sending warning letters to

suspected users of pirated software, requesting them to legalize. Whilst some

users heeded Autodesk's warning, a significant majority chose to ignore this

warning. "We were initially reluctant to proceed to enforce our rights

using the process of court action, but the blatant disregard of some users by

persisting in using pirated copies of our software, left us with little choice

but to proceed to the courts for relief." said, Autodesk's Asia-Pacific

Legal Counsel, Stuart Ong.

This message has also been strongly emphasized by Autodesk South Asia Pacific

managing director, Andre Pravaz region that Autodesk will start to take legal

action against users who persist in using pirated Autodesk software.



"Under no circumstances will we tolerate the use of pirated versions of our
software," stressed Pravaz. "We have given ample warning and we are

very serious about this. Theft of our software gives illegal users who flout the

law an unfair advantage over legal users. Illegal users operate at a lower cost

as they do not pay for the software and technology that they are using, yet they

are charging their customers through the work that they generate with these

software."






"Piracy is theft of our intellectual property," added Stuart Ong.
"This is only the start of our crackdown, as we work towards achieving

"Zero Tolerance" to eradicate use of pirated versions of Autodesk

software. Users must understand and respect the intellectual property rights of

developers in the IT industry. This respect will encourage further developments

in the IT industry, for the benefit of everyone."






The use of pirated software results in tremendous losses to software developers
as well as to the Government by way of tax revenues from legitimate downstream

business in the software industry in India. Aspiring software developers in the

country will also be discouraged from creating new innovation if there is no

respect for Intellectual Property Rights and they would be hesitant from

exploiting their economic rights which would otherwise benefit them from their

creation.