In a case that might serve as a warning for district administrators and technology coordinators from coast to coast, a school system outside of Chicago has agreed to pay $50,000 to a computer trade organization after discovering that a former employee had copied software onto school computers illegally.

Officials from Community Unit School District 300 in Carpentersville, Ill., settled out of court after discussions with their lawyers and the Business Software Alliance (BSA), an international association of software makers that attempts to enforce copyright restrictions and curb software piracy.

On Sept. 10, the school board voted to pay BSA after discovering that a former employee at Jacobs High School—who has since resigned—brought in a copy of Adobe's Acrobat software and downloaded the program illegally onto several desktop machines used by administrators at the school.

According to Superintendent Ken Arndt, there also were some illegally copied versions of Microsoft software on the district's computers, though he was unsure of the exact program.

Arndt has only been employed at District 300 for two-and-a-half months but has been working to resolve the copyright infringement issues since he started.

"It's my understanding that the situation was brought to the district's attention about a year and a half ago by the BSA," he said, adding that he was not sure how BSA received the tip.

Regardless of how the organization learned of the problem, Arndt admits the violations did occur and lawyers were involved, though no formal lawsuit was ever filed. The district has complied with the investigation fully, he said.

District officials attribute the copyright infringement to a lack of knowledge about what constituted a violation. "There was also a lack of knowledge that districts need licensing agreements to use software," Arndt said. "A lot of employees and administrators did not know that."

Schools can be particularly susceptible to inadvertent software piracy, because many educators don't have a clear understanding of what they are allowed to copy for free and what is protected under copyright law.

"A lot of times an employee will bring in a program and install it because they have a receipt for it, and think 'Hey, I own this, so I can do what I want with it.' They don't realize that they need a special [multiple-user] license," said Arndt. "There is a lot of misconception. It gets confusing because there is free software that [school users] can download legally, too."

District 300 has learned an expensive lesson, officials say. But the $50,000 settlement is actually lower than the initial figure requested by BSA, which was 1.5 percent of the market value of the software.

The settlement was reached through negotiations between the district's attorneys and BSA. Arndt was unsure of the exact amount BSA initially requested.