The vendor's notice arrives: the audit found unlicensed installations, and the amount has a lot of zeros. The deadline is short, IT wants to uninstall everything today, and nobody has checked the count.
How forensic examination checks licence counts, compares source code and proves ownership and priority, for the party making the claim and the party facing it.
Software disputes are decided on counts and on code. The vendor's audit arrives with a finished report: machines, installations, metric, amount. The company accepts or denies in the dark, and IT, uninstalling in a hurry, erases the evidence of what the installed base looked like.
In code copying, the fight is between similarity and copying. Systems in the same sector look alike, and the law does not treat similarity imposed by function as infringement. What separates the two is the arbitrary: the comment with the same mistake, the repeated bug.
Adriano Vallim works on both sides, in different cases: as court-appointed expert in actions brought by vendors and as party-appointed expert for audited companies, with a conflict check before each case. The course shows what the examination checks and what the lawyer should request.
Pick as many courses as you like: they are kept and arrive ticked on the registration form.
A company was notified by a foreign developer, with a multimillion claim calculated in the vendor's own audit. The examination checked the report against the real inventory of the installed base: decommissioned machines, licences left out of the count and metrics applied incorrectly. The inaccuracies demonstrated cut the amount claimed by more than half, in a negotiation based on verifiable facts.
In another licensing dispute, the work was for the defence of the company being charged. An on-site inspection and forensic images of the equipment supported the conclusion that no amount was owed.
A development contract was terminated with no agreement on what had been delivered. The repositories were preserved with their full history, and the commits were compared with the acceptance testing up to the termination date. The examination established, with dated evidence, what was ready and where the failures came from.
Months after a developer leaves, a company sees its system reborn at a competitor, which says the sector dictates the screens. The examination compares the codebases, separates third-party libraries and open-source code, and looks for the arbitrary: the same comment with the same mistake. Through the repository, it shows who wrote each part, and when.
In groups of four, with a fictitious audit report covering twenty machines, the summary contract and the asset inventory, participants use the Where the count goes wrong chart for 12 minutes, point out what comes off the count and draft three expert questions. The instructor reveals the planted discrepancies.
Laws and rulings discussed
Law 9,609/1998 (Brazilian Software Act) · Law 9,610/1998 (Brazilian Copyright Act) · CPC, arts. 148, II, 381, 466, § 1º, and 467 (Brazilian Code of Civil Procedure)
See also
Software and Development Project Forensics → Intellectual Property, Trade Secrets and Unfair Competition → Judicial and Extrajudicial Expert Work → Representative Cases → See all courses →