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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.
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.
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.
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?
Hit 40 feet left of their buildings you mean.
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.
Never!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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.