General

Has anybody ever experienced an audit of the BSA in a company? If so, I would like to know about it, because I thought about such cases a bit and came to an interesting idea:

The BSA's members are all big software companies, some of them facing charges due to anti-competitive measures. So, these companies generally want to raise their product portfolio and general influence on the software market. And what do you do if you don't have the time to write software by yourself? You buy other companies that already did your work (plus their portfolio, of course). Or you simply take it from other companies. And what do need to do in order to take other companies' software? You have to go to there and take it. And what does the BSA do? Right, they go to other companies and "audit" them.

Of course, this sounds like a bad conspiracy theory, but think about it: law enforcement agencies are overly enthusiastic in cooperating with such organizations, and eager to seize computer equipment and hand it over to organizations such as the BSA for analyzing the contents. And no, law enforcement agencies don't seize single harddisks, they usually seize everything. When all of the storage media is handed over to the BSA, it's very easy for them to not only check for possible illegal copies of their members' software, but also possible to check for the audited company's trade secrets, source code, design plans, etc.

My conclusion is that a number of big companies could easily form an organization similar to the BSA (or have already formed an organization similar to the BSA, or the formed organization is the BSA itself) that aims for a legitimate goal, but could also do industrial espionage on a grand scale. The precondition seem to be right to achieve such a goal, but currently, no organization has been proven to do just that (on a side note: the US were totally unaware of actual al-Qaida terrorists on their territory until they uncovered several terroristic cells a few days before New Year's Eve 1999/2000, but about the possibility was speculated before).