singapore & vietnam
PROJECT
Content
Some of the further actions taken by the Singapore government in combating software piracy include the following:
1. Landlord liability,
2. Warrantless seizures and
3. Seizure presumptions.
For pirated software vendors to continue to function, they need a place in to peddle their stuffs. This is only possible if the landlords turn a blind eye to their illegal activities. Thus, by making the landlords responsible under the law and subjected to criminal prosecution, they will think twice before leashing out their premises to would-be pirates [11].
Also warrantless seizures and seizure presumption enable faster and more efficient enforcement actions to be taken against software pirates. For warrantless seizures, as long as the software products displayed in public are obviously pirated, law enforcement agents is empowered under the law to confiscate them and arrest the individual involved without the need to apply for a warrant. In seizure presumption, as long as a single software product is identified to be pirated, the whole inventory is presumed to be pirated until proven otherwise and will be subsequently seized. Precious time is saved this way, as individual items need not be check for their pirate status during anti-piracy operation [12].
In Vietnam, the government had plans to do something rather radical to eliminate software piracy. The authorities want to embrace open-source software in order to stop the problem of software piracy - which is threatening to thwart the country’s economical growth. Since it is known that one of the contributing factors to increasing software piracy rate is that affordability of the original software products, advocating the usage of open-source software – which is technically free – is an excellent idea [13].
Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology are trying to get all state-owned companies and government ministries to use open-source software by 2005. And they would also require all computers assembled in Vietnam to be sold with open-source products installed on them [14].
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