Slashdot Mirror
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. "
If the CIA really needs the IP, they could just declare it as eminent domain. Problem solved.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
"Take down" and "prevent from flying due to a legal injuction" are not synonyms.
This is what copyright law was intended for, not for going after high-school students and grandmas.
Created by the community, maybe not. Free Software? Definitely. The buyer (in this case, the DoD) absolutely should require the FSF's four freedoms for any code that they buy. If they can't audit the code, fix bugs, or deploy modified versions, they are selling national security to commercial interests. If they can't get another company to come in and maintain the software or use it in the next generation, then they are locked in to a single supplier.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yea, we should scrap them and go back to B-17's. 100% of the ordinance they dropped hit their intended targets. Course it's pretty hard to miss the ground...
In all seriousness though, you're aiming a missile at a spot on the ground and you have a flying video camera that can stick around. It's not very hard to figure out if you hit the spot on the ground you were aiming at. Anything beyond that is a target selection/ordinance effectiveness issue and would have absolutely nothing to do with the predator software, pirated or not. In addition, I'm not that well versed with the predator company, but they just make the plane right? If that's the case if whatever ordinance it's carrying detaches from the mount correctly it's done it's job. Wouldn't the missile guidance/software belong to whatever company manufactures the missile?
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.