NSRL Acknowledgements

The NSRL welcomes donations of software that is on the original commercial media. Donations are accepted under a "non-use" assumption; we do not need installation codes, we will not install and use the software for daily business, we do not need most of the manuals.

The following organizations and persons have donated software for inclusion in the NSRL:

Adobe Systems Incorporated
U.S. Air Force
Blizzard Entertainment
Faronics Incorporated
Federal Bureau of Investigation
U.S. Food and Drug Administration
Internet Archive
Microsoft
Netherlands Forensic Institute
NIST
Oracle Corporation
Sanderson Forensics
G. Sherwood
Summitsoft Corporation
Valve Corporation
WetStone Technologies, Inc.

We thank these organizations for their generosity.

The NSRL can be used to prosecute intellectual property crimes. A law enforcement agent or investigator can have easy and definitive access to prove that a given piece of software is or is not a copy of specific software. From a practical point of view, this means the prosecution will not have to obtain a copy of X software to prove that a file found on a defendant's system is from X software. The NSRL can easily be used in criminal and civil cases and in other investigations and dispute procedures.

Contributing to the NSRL shows a strong commitment to corporate citizenship. Much of the use of the NSRL will be to speed the investigative process. This directly helps law enforcement solve cases faster and with less cost. The NSRL is used by the FBI, the Secret Service, DoD, the US Customs Service, and many state, local and international agencies and private corporations.

To contribute, a company needs to either send NIST off-the-shelf versions of their software or provide NIST the ability to download software from a corporate website. NIST will not use the software; it will only be used as data to populate the NSRL database and subsequently released in the Reference Data Set (RDS).

Contributors receive one release of the RDS free of charge. The free release is traditionally the next quarterly release after the donation, so that the donated software is included.