It's Time to Create a Change for Better Date:   Tuesday , March 15, 2016 The 1988 founded BSA - The Software Alliance is a Washington headquartered non-profit trade association that is active in over 80 countries. Representing the interest of all major publishers, BSA advocates for policy changes globally, encourages a culture for entrepreneurship and innovation and helps create a level playing field in these markets. The incredibly active Indian market is currently thriving with great ideas, resources, skills, attitude and above all - support of the government, which is constructing a framework to support innovation and entrepreneurship. This should be leveraged and the ideas should be protected to get the investors flooding in. The piracy rate in India is through the roof. The recently revised copyright law is strong enough. But, the problem is in its interpretation and availing adequate mechanisms to enforce what lies within the law. While there is a set of population that deliberately infringes, it comes mostly from the lack of awareness in understanding the access rights one has within the company and tracking the expiration date of licenses. Since it is crucial for companies to establish standards to manage their software assets, we have joined hands with ISO to create an ISO standard for proper asset management. We help Indian companies to implement ISO standards and facilitate them to understand the number of softwares they procure, the softwares they actually use and the softwares they need to re-allocate. After implementation, many companies have enhanced their efficiency & productivity and have recouped their investments under six months. Harnessing the Power The tremendous power of data and tools are empowering the farmers to receive updates, development of medical devices, and analysis of social media to pinpoint the mood & culture of a place. On the other hand, several policy questions keep popping up: Is there a privacy breach? Is there a security threat? Does it allow cross border transactions? If organizations are unable to answer these questions, they should be controlled. Hence, along with the state and central governments of India, we are striving to build a strong policy agenda. We also run partnership programs with business communities to help them appreciate the value of IP in the software they purchase. Aside from familiar enterprises such as Microsoft, IBM, DELL and Symantec, our membership portfolio also contains not so familiar companies that share similar interest and vision. Though we don\'t have any startups as our members at present, we\'re actively looking for them to join us. However, organizations don\'t need to be our members for us to work with them. For instance, the biggest asset of a startup is their intellectual property. We work closely with the government on strengthening the mechanisms available to protect the IP of a computer related invention. We ensure that it is enforced, validated and upheld by the court, in case of infringement. Thus, we are working on issues that are of great value to the industry. Besides learning from each other, BSA members have an opportunity to create a change for the better. As we help the state government to update their procurement mechanisms for IT products, there\'s a great chance for our members to edify government about the evolution of IT and purchasing of IT products in a beneficial way. (As told to Ananth.V & Susila Govindaraj)