U.S. Government Sued for Software Piracy, Maker Claims $600m

The U.S. military is being accused of installing 'pirated' copies of 3D virtual reality software onto hundreds of thousands of computers without permission. Bitmanagement, the makers of the software, accuse the Navy of willful copyright infringement and are suing the Government for more than half a billion dollars in unpaid licenses.

usnavyIn recent years the U.S. Government has taken an aggressive stance towards copyright infringement, both at home and abroad.

However, that doesn’t mean that the Government always sticks to the rules, quite the contrary. In a recent lawsuit it stands accused of willful copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The case centers around “BS Contact Geo,” a 3D virtual reality application developed by the German company Bitmanagement. The Navy was enthusiastic about the geographical modeling capabilities of the software and in 2011 and 2012 it agreed to license its use for 38 computers.

“Those individual PC-based licenses authorized the Navy to install BS Contact Geo on a total of just 38 computers for the purposes of testing, trial runs, and integration into Navy systems,” the software vendor states in the federal claims court complaint (pdf).

After testing the application for a while, both parties started negotiating the licensing of additional computers. However, before any deals were made, the software maker learned that the Navy had already installed it on over 100,000 computers.

According to emails Bitmanagement executives received in 2013, the software had been rolled onto at least 558,466 computers on the Navy’s network, without their permission.

Full article: https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-sued-for-software-piracy-maker-claims-600m-160720/