What to do when co-workers use software that is not in the terms

Question

This happened last year and I did nothing but it's one regret that I have. I'm not sure how I should have handled this or indeed if I could have done anything.

I'm an IT contractor and last year worked for a multinational (>10k employees) and the team I worked with used a software tool continually on 'trial mode' to do commercial work.. this is against the T&C of said software product. The reason they did this was that the VP in charge didn't want to pay the licence and his statement was something like 'when I did the work, we used x that was free so you don't need to use y'. He did however know that people did use the tool but didn't care as he wasn't paying for the licence.

This angered me as they had the money so could easily afford the licence fee and the company they were 'stealing' from is a small startup and I know a few people who work for this company.

The VP in charge was pretty toxic, not the type of person you could go 'raise' concerns with.

Telling the vendor software company wouldn't help as they can simply deny it was happening and would be my word against theirs.

I don't feel I'm looking any sort of revenge and only for them to simply play by the rules and pay for the product and not rip it off. The company that i worked for were much much bigger than the software vendor company.

Any advice of what I should/could do?

Answer 1

It's not a current issue for you, so it's a bit late to do anything constructive.

In future as a contractor if you're unhappy with the conditions of employment in any way you can decline to take the contract or complain (this can be career limiting). It all depends on how strongly you feel on a matter.

Answer 2

The given and accepted answer is correct, but I want to highlight a very specific pitfall here. If you are asked to work with this software (outside of its license), and you do so, you may be on the hook for paying damages, because as a contractor, you are a company of your own and your company is legally liable.

This happened to my previous employer $Consultancy. They sent one of their employees $Consultant on a consultancy contract with $Client, where the $Consultant worked with an unlicensed version of a well known PDF generation library.
The unlicensed usage was happening well before $Consultant got involved with the project, but $Consultant was not informed of this. After all, $Consultant assumed that any licensing is the responsibility of $Client, who is expected to make the tools for $Consultant to work the contract available to them.

When the library vendor sued $Client for infractions on its license policy, they also knew which people had been using the unlicensed version, and noticed that $Consultant was on this list of people. They subsequently also included $Consultancy to the court case.

After a short legal battle, the fine was split between $Client and $Consultancy, as both companies had violated the license policy, since such infractions are defined as whose employee(s) committed the infractions.

According to $Consultancy's lawyers, the only way to avoid this if there was reasonable doubt (or direct proof) that $Consultant could not have known the software was unlicensed, but that was sadly not the case here.

After that, we were all explicitly instructed to abjectly refuse to work with unlicensed tools at all clients, at all times. This led to the end of several contracts, but the fines were hefty enough that $Consultancy did not want to go through that again.

Answer 3

There's almost certainly nothing you can do to change this; if senior management has made a decision, they're not going to change that because a contractor doesn't like it.

Given that, about the only thing you can do is to examine your own personal values and decide how strongly you feel about this. If you feel strongly enough, you can resign and not work with that company any more.

Answer 4

If the vendor of the software is a member of the Business Software Alliance (BSA), you can file a report about unlicensed software usage. The BSA will investigate your report and potentially take legal action against your company. If your company ends up settling, you might even receive a financial reward from the BSA.

Answer 5

You said: "Telling the vendor software company wouldn't help as they can simply deny it was happening and would be my word against theirs."

No, it wouldn't be your word against theirs, if it went to court. In the USA, for example, if this went to court, then the vendor's lawyer would ask employees of the company whether they used the software. And the important thing there is that an employee lying about this would be committing a serious crime - much more serious than using the software without license. No experienced employee in that situation would lie for their company. So the truth would come out. Same for that VP, lying himself would be a serious crime. But telling employees to lie in court is even worse!

So your choices as a contractor are: Pay a license for yourself, or don't use that software. And in the back of your mind, you can keep that information, and if the company upsets you, you can upset them much worse. Apart from that I'd keep quiet about it.

Answer 6

Talk to a lawyer about whistle-blowing.

I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice.

It's quite possible that blowing the whistle on your employer might be a viable course of action; depending on location, there might be legal protections in place for whistle-blowers. As a result, if you're considering blowing the whistle on your employer, I would recommend talking to a lawyer about how the local laws would affect you.

Also, if you were to blow the whistle, in this case, it seems likely that the ultimate outcome would be for the company whose software is being illicitly used would be able to sue your employer for violating the terms of its software license; in that case, it wouldn't just be your word against your employer, because the software vendor's lawyers should be able to request all of your employer's records on the subject as a part of discovery.