BCS President President HM Mahfuzul Arif has urged Microsoft Bangladesh to provide free genuine Microsoft software for students. He also announced five-point campaign for raising awareness to increase the use of genuine software across the country.
BCS will hold campaign targeted at general public, users of tech products and retailers to raise awareness through road-show in different parts of the country, seminars for technology retailers on implementation of Copyright Act and cyber-crime, presenting a just, transparent and balanced interpretation of the ICT policy in the tenders that require appropriate use of technological products and software, assisting BCS audit division in investigating the use of genuine software in tenders held the last 24 months as well as perform regular inspection of various IT markets to ensure the sale of genuine software.
The announcement was made last Thursday in a meeting with journalists at the Dhanmondi auditorium of the BCS Innovation Center. Managing Director of Microsoft Bangladesh Sonia Bashir, Deputy Registrar of Copyright Directorate Zohra Begum, BCS Secretary General Nazrul Islam were among the present.
But above all else, the topic of a subsidy project for Bangladesh garnered most emphasis in the Q&A session. It was urged to reduce the price of Microsoft products in order to bring them within the purchasing capacity of the general public of Bangladesh.
Sonia Bashir said, “Microsoft is working to reduce piracy worldwide. Microsoft believes that it is their responsibility to keep customers and businesses away from harmful effect due to piracy. Microsoft is working on their own accord as well as with BCS in technological development and their increasing use. They are also working to fight against cyber-crimes such as spam, internet eavesdropping, hacking all over the internet.”
“We may be poor but we are not thieves. We should avoid using counterfeit software”, She added.
AHM Mahfuzul Arif said, “A client always wishes to do his/her job perfectly. But s/he is frequently defrauded which causes a lot of pain. Clients do not receive important product updates and technical support if s/he is using counterfeit software as well as being extremely vulnerable to buggy code, spyw”are, worms and viruses. That is why BCS is working with Microsoft to find a way to solve this problem.”
Deputy Registrar of Copyright Directorate Zohra Begum said, “Raising awareness on following copyright law is of utmost important. But we work based on complaint in this regard. We have a task force working on it. In case of any violation of the law any security official of the sub-inspector rank can confiscate the products if necessary. According to the provision of the law, anyone who is violating the copyright law for any creative law other than movies can be penalized with up to four years in prison and a fine up to 50 thousand taka.”