That was what scared the Department of Labor. The incredible restrictions that they placed on the use of software were bizarre to the end user, but the threat of litigation (even with the sovereign protections built into US law) prompted them all.
By the time I retired, the Labor Department IT "system" was a huge ball of restrictive conditions on use, all of which combined to make any "official" use of a computer a huge headache. I tried doing it their way for a brief time, then gave up and only used the government computer for certifying my employee's work hours.
(The truly amazing thing about it all is that one supremely misguided individual, even with all of the spyware and use restrictions, still managed to amass a huge collection of child pornography on his work desktop computer. Mind you, they caught him in the end and sent him up the river to The Joint for a long, long time. But, it took them a full year to do it, and he was only caught when someone glimpsed him viewing some during work hours. The investigation in his case was done by the FBI, and the jackbooted way that they pounced was incredibly heavy-handed - they impounded every single hard drive in the entire office, effectively shutting down the six state wide operation for a couple of days. The regional administrator at the time confessed to almost losing control of his bowels when the thing went down. No explanation was given at the time, just a court order to allow the data specialists from the Bureau to yank all of the hard drives.)
In the end, it was more cost-effective to purchase your own copy of Microsoft Word and use it on your laptop than it was to live with the weird copy protection, onerous password schema and hardware keys with the government provided version.
One area director lost his dongle when traveling, causing a major crisis since daily situation reports on an ongoing investigation were required of him yet he could not access his copy of the software. (He was too cheap to buy his own computer and software.)
An then there were the password schemes. Monthly compulsory changes, with no duplication from previous passwords and with every password over eight characters with mandatory use of upper case, lower case, numbers and special characters. Mind you, they may have kept the terrorists out, but there were many times where the intended end users were kept out as well.
In the end, I was using Japanese warship names + the year of their sinking + one special character at the end of each string. I still got locked out about once a month.
However, the great bane of music publishing companies has to be the easy availability of the photocopying machine. When I started my work career in the late 1960's, use of the copying machine was a strictly controlled thing, with each use logged on a tear sheet on the "official photocopy clipboard" and woe betide the user who put down the incorrect number of copies. And, forget about personal use of the high holy copy machine.
Now, I have a copier in my home office that does everything the quarter room sized copier at the Veterans Administration did, plus about twenty things more and all of them better, faster and cheaper. And, it only cost me $300.00.
Anybody with one of these plus the money for the toner cartridges could duplicate huge numbers of arrangements, given access to the originals.
