My brush with UK government software piracy.
I only mention this now, because it turns out it might be more prevalent than I thought - but worth mentioning because of the irony involved.
So, last year I accidentally drove through a very badly signposted bus lane in the beautiful city of Bath - and then a few days letter I got a letter from the council there telling me I had to give them money. Fair enough, I made a mistake and get fined, so I paid up.
Whilst on the automated phoneline trying to pay I noticed the letter had a picture of my car, but at the bottom was the typical Elecard ’demo license expired’ message. Elecard, for those that don’t know is a Russian company who write a lot of software related to video - in this case it was their MPG2 codec that was being used without a license.
It amused me, but being a busybody I contacted Elecard to tell them about it, because let’s face it - it isn’t right.
And then yesterday, I find out that Camden council are doing the exact same thing with an expired demo codec.
I always assumed that my taxes went to ensuring that my local council (neither of those mentioned above) was legal in the software dept as well as the occassional service (police? haven’t seen any on the beat for months). Now I find out that some councils are useing expired demo software to extract money from normal people. Given that there seems to be a widely held belief that Russia is a hotbed of software piracy, it amused me to see somewhere like the UK blatantly abusing the license of a Russian company.
Apparently there are about 4,200,000 closed circuit cameras in the UK - if I were Elecard I’d be contacting FAST to check them all on my behalf about now.
1 year ago