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Pirated Software Could Bring Down Predator Drones
Pickens writes "Fast Company reports that Massachusetts Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle will soon issue a decision on an intellectual property-related lawsuit that could ground the CIA's Predator drones. Intelligent Integration Systems (IISi) alleges that their Geospatial Toolkit and Extended SQL Toolkit were pirated by Massachusetts-based Netezza for use by a government client and is seeking an injunction that would halt the use of their two toolkits by Netezza for three years. The dispute goes back to when Netezza and IISi were former partners in a contract to develop software that would be used, among other purposes, for unmanned drones. IISi's suit claims that both the software package used by the CIA and the Netezza Spatial product were built using their intellectual property and according to statements made by IISi CEO Paul Davis, a favorable ruling in the injunction would revoke the CIA's license to use Geospatial. If IISi prevails in court this would either force the CIA to ground Predator drones or to break the law in their use of the pirated software. But there's more. Testimony given by an IISi executive to the court indicates that Netezza illegally and hastily reverse-engineered IISi's code to deliver a faulty version that could cause predator drones to miss their targets by as much as 40 feet. "
Did someone come back in time and start IISi in order to delay the deployment of Skynet by a few years?
Brilliant!
If the CIA really needs the IP, they could just declare it as eminent domain. Problem solved.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Predator drones should use only open source software created by the community at large...
so all of us can help contribute to their accuracy and make sure they kill the right people...
Uhh.... wait... what?
Oh nooooooooo. :|
"Take down" and "prevent from flying due to a legal injuction" are not synonyms.
I know, it's Slashdot. But still ..
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
... by as much as 40 feet
It's a good thing drones don't have feet then.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The preditors will not have to stop flying based on a ruling that the intellectual property of IISI was stolen. See the last clause of the fifth amendment to our Constitution: "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." This means the CIA doesn't need a license, it just needs to be willing to pay just compensation.
Of course, what constitutes "just compensation" tends to be considerably less than fair market value in practice. Fortunately for the tax payors, CIA might have a breach of contract claim against Netezza if the facts are as reported.
Yes, IAAL, but I am not YOUR L.
This is what copyright law was intended for, not for going after high-school students and grandmas.
This may be a rare case in which a narrow ruling (e.g., on an IP scuffle) might just have the ability to affect broader policy and policy debate - on at least two important fronts, to boot. Indeed, this is likely why this particular case made it all the way to a state Supreme Court in the first place - replace "drones" with any other disruptive technology and this action likely never gets the traction to do so.
./ spends much time debating to, again, even if only marginally, raise those issues' profile in Americans' consciousness.
Obviously, by "Hearts & Minds," I was attempting to evoke the cost of drone-deployment in combat zones, which are many, i.e.,10 civilians killed for each "militant" in these "targeted killings" alone (Brookings - 2009), wherein this sort of murdering of civilians has made the United States' combat efforts so much more difficult and extensive as each of those ten civilians' friends and family are each pushed marginally closer to becoming an "enemy combatant" themselves....
But the "Hearts and Minds" of Americans are at stake too, and not only because the question, "How long until we bring UAVs home for domestic 'policing'?" might very well frighten a broad swath of the U.S. political spectrum.
The hearts and minds of Americans, saturated by war coverage and often passionate in one way or another, may also be incidentally opened to:
- The costs and consequences of current intellectual property law;
- The ubiquity of unscrutinized "black box" software systems running the complicated machinery that runs our lives - runaway Toyatas, meet runaway Drones;
- The extent of the government's ability to quickly circumvent the Codes and laws that hinder individuals and corporations alike.
Of course, TFA says "some sort of face-saving resolution" is most likely, but, one might hope that the passion that Americans' seem to harbor about their war effort might trickle over into other issues that
At least, that is, before the next news cycle.
After hearing repeated stories of these drones missing their targets or hitting innocents, how do we know they are accurate with or without pirated software?
Does anyone REALLY know if they did hit their intended targets? No one is actually on the ground to confirm the accuracy of their hits.
After all, they are remote-controlled and target based on information that could easily be inaccurate.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Patents, trademarks, copyrights, contracts, trade secrets?
I ask because the obvious interpretation, that it's a copyright claim, might not be so black and white.
The claim appears to be that the software was reverse engineered and then modified, which would make the resultant system a derivative work with significant transformation. As anyone who's actually reverse engineered a non-trivial binary will tell you, whatever you get to compile in the end will pretty much be an "influenced by" ground up re-write.
And since copyright only covers the particular expression of an idea, not the idea itself, this might turn into a pretty entertaining bun fight.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Clearly nobody did their homework. The IP in question is used by the data mining software used to identify and select targets. The reverse-engineered part doesn't handle the geometry correctly, and can give the Predators the wrong location to shoot at.
The company's president and his lawyers died in a mysterious pair of unexplained explosions where something from the sky hit their buildings and exploded.
The US government has a press release that says the explosions were the cause of swamp gas reflecting off of venus.
Quit the breathless hyperbole, slashdot editors. Absolutely NOTHING is going to happen to the Predator drones. End of story.
it'll be declared a national security issue and buried in the courts forever.
Their great-grandchildren might get a notice someday.
The courts don't consider it confusing terminology because they are of one mind with Humpty Dumpty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty#In_Through_the_Looking-Glass.
I can't decide whether I consider it funny or scary that that passage has appeared in 250 judicial decisions in the U.S., including two Supreme Court decisions.
The Reg had this a few weeks back. If the plane tells a bomb/missile the wrong coordinates it would be the plane at fault. Netazza didn't have permission to port the code, but they did tell the CIA about the potential error they had introduced by their unauthorized port from ppc to x86. The CIA said "we can accept that" probably while mumbling something about horseshoes, hand-grenades, and hellfires. The CIA later said "actually we think the discrepancy is an indication of inaccuracy in the *previous* system." Which if you think about it seems more likely in that the x86 has larger fpu registers than the ppc, but either way the customer knew about the defects of the sold software. They probably didn't know that it was violating a contract between the provider and its subcontractor.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
So if the bits in a file are media, copying them isn't theft since they are still there so the 'pirating' is A-OK.
If the bits in a file are under the GPL or some other open source license it is now somehow wrong to pirate them even though all the bits are still there.
Got it.
No, wait, don't got it.
Never!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
This software apparently affects the ability of the drone to arrive/fly directly over a specific pre-plotted location, (missing by up to 40 feet? Sounds like someone fubbed their Quaternions!) and from what I understand would not affect the actual employment of the laser guided hellfire missiles, which are aimed by the ground operator to his (the drone's) line of sight.
Now the navigational errors seem somewhat small, but multiple misses across waypoints could add up to a couple seconds difference in arrival times and corresponding locations, and headaches in trying to zero an inertial navigation system if the drones have them.
So this only affects the CIA run Predators? What about those flown by the Air Force ? I know they have some Predator drones they use. (Some are controlled in Grand Forks and by the 199th in Fargo.
the INSLAW affair?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inslaw
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html
Hi, I'm Chris Hansen. What are you doing here? Why don't you take a seat, right over there.
If IISi prevails in court this would either force the CIA to ground Predator drones or to break the law in their use of the pirated software.
Why are those the only two options? Seems to me the most logical option is for the CIA to license IISi's software and drop the real toolkit in place of the badly pirated one. Yes, I know Netezza is seeking an injunction but I bet if the CIA came along with several million dollars it would be accepted. The drones keep flying, Netezza makes the profit they wanted to, etc. Or is that too sensible a course of action?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Physical property is just as imaginary as intellectual property. Physical possession is not, but property is. If someone robs you of a possession, the only thing that connects you to that object is a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo, similar to the legal mumbo jumbo which makes up intellectual property. The main difference? Everyone is now used to physical property, since we've had a few odd centuries to become accustomed to it.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Be real, the CIA will keep the drones flying no matter what some piss ant judge says.
At breaking laws and acting without morality or conscience against the interests of the nation and humanity?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
No one wants IIS anywhere in or near a drone. Just imagine the security holes ! Anyway, wouldn't Apache be a more catchier name for a drone ?!
Am I the only one concerned that some IP legal battle could ground the planes? If GM steals some contractors software and puts it in their new SUVs does it mean people who own those SUVs can't drive them? I understand that no more predators should be built using the code, but to render useless all the predators already in use seems wrong. According to US law if I purchase stolen property I have to give it back for free even if I didn't know it was stolen, so if a company stole property on a grand scale would all the purchasers have to hand it back?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Am I the only one who finds it sad that all the complaints from our allies in Pakistan about the inaccuracy of the predator killing their citizens didn't move us one bit...but when it turned out the software was massively inaccurate due to being a pirated version of a beta, then one little "IP" lawsuit can get the whole program shut down?
Seriously. We are now hated by the populus of our most important ally in this effort, entirely due to the collateral damage from these drone strikes. Polls show the US is now less popular in Pakistan than in any other country on earth. This seriously jeapordizes our entire effort. But people only start caring about the targeting software's crappyness when some tiny company's "Intellectual Property" is violated? Do we seriously care more about that than the lives of our professed friends?
This is actually very good news for those among us who favour copyright reform. Sure individual cases like this aren't going to cause much change by themselves, but when there is a national security and a 'limitless powers to the CIA' argument for softening copyright law, suddenly there are a whole lot of influential people on our side who were against us before.
The fact is that we simple cannot do without these drones- as americans we must do whatever is necessary to ensure we maintain our strategic advantage with reaper and predator drones, and that we need to honor this technology with a special day here in the US! One notable initiative is 'Drone Day'- a grassroots movement to bolster patriotism and gratitude towards our helpers:
http://sladeisking.com/2010/10/09/celebrate-october-7th-as-predator-drone-day/